Worst week for science ever

Sunday: American Society for Microbiology scrubs mentions of diversity from their websites.

Tuesday: NASA stops everything to scrub mentioned of diversity from their websites; ICE arrests a student on campus; NSF announces plans to make deep cut to staff; USAID is halted.

Wednesday: HHMI kills one of its diversity program; NIH trashes applications for diversity F grants.

Friday: NIH cuts its indirect costs and sets them to 15%.

Yes, these are all American centric. But the United States was, until the start of 2025, the world’s undisputed science superpower. These effects will not be contained within the borders of the United States.

Pursing integrity over excellence in research assessment

I was reading yet another “Scientists behaving badly” article. This one was about Jonathan Pruitt, who used to work where I used to work (different departments). And, as it usual in these articles, there is a section about how institutions assess research:

Many attribute the rising rate of retractions to academia’s high-pressure publish-or-perish norms, where the only route to a coveted and increasingly scarce permanent job, along with the protections of tenure and better pay, is to produce as many journal articles as possible. That research output isn’t just about publishing papers but also how often they’re cited. Some researchers might try to bring up their h-index (which measures scientific impact, based on how many times one is published and cited), or a journal might hope that sharing particularly enticing results will enhance its impact factor (calculated using the number of citations a journal receives and the number of articles it publishes within a two-year period).

It finally occurred to me that focusing on the indicators like citations and Impact Factor are all symptoms of a larger mindset.

The major watchword for administrators and funders for decades has been “excellence.” Some prefer a near synonym, “impact.” Everyone wanted to reward excellent research, which is an easy sell. Nobody wants to admit that they want to support average research — even though that’s what most research is, by definition. But most of science progresses by millimetres on the basis of average research. Even poor research can have some nuggets of data or ideas that can be useful to others.

I suggest a new overarching principle to guide assessment: integrity. We should be paying attention to, and rewarding research and researchers that act in the most trustworthy ways. Who are building the most solid and dependable research. That can be assessed by practices like data sharing and code sharing, and by showing of community use and replication.

The pursuit of excellence has proved too fickle and too likely to make people act sketchy to become famous. Let’s change the target.

Update, 28 November 2024: Blog post by Grace Gottleib on how to assess integrity.

External links

A rock-star researcher spun a web of lies—and nearly got away with it

Rhodes Trust is academia’s equivalent to Confederate statues and flags

In the last few years in the United States, there’s been debate about the presence of Confederate flags and statues in public places. I credit Bree Newsome for getting this ball rolling. The Confederacy was built on the notion that slavery was right and just.

Continuing to display the symbols of that failed government on public grounds is tacit endorsement of the ideals of white supremacy. Put those statues and flags that are on government property in museums.

This morning, I was given a link to a fellowship and was asked to promote it. I had two problems with that, and the first was that the fellowship had a lot of ties to the Rhodes Trust.

As a student, I learned about Cecil Rhodes because of his association with Oxford’s Rhodes Scholarships (supported by the Rhodes Trust). That name had a positive association for me.

It was only later that I learned, “Man, this dude was racist as fuck.” In Born a Crime, Trevor Noah says if many Africans had a time machine, they wouldn’t go back in time to stop Adolf Hitler, they’d be packing heat for Cecil Rhodes. (Edit: Yes, this is admittedly a big gap in my education. I should have known.)

I wish I had learned about Rhodes’s colonial racism first, not years after hearing about the scholarships. The misery Rhodes caused in life seems more important to me than the money he left behind after death.

The second problem I had with this fellowship was that it was for “leading academic institutions.” I’m pretty sure that means American Ivy League institutions and English Oxbridge universities, and not the sort of public, regional institutions where most students in the world get their university educations. (The sort of place I work.)

Racist and elitist was not a winning combination for me. I did not push out notification of the fellowship. Admittedly, this was made easier because the deadline was past, but I wouldn’t have done it regardless.

Is Rhodes the only example? When I mentioned this on Twitter, “Sackler” came up. Like Rhodes, I first heard that name in a positive light: the Sackler symposium on science communication, which I’ve blogged about several times (here in 2012, here in 2013). But the Sackler family is problematic: they made a lot of money from opioids, which is now a major public health problem. And that name is on museums and medical schools.

Like Rhodes, I should have known about the Sackler drug connection before I knew about the symposium. That’s not good.

Turning money isn’t as easy as taking down a flag on a pole, or a statue in a park. But the principle is the same. Academia needs to look harder at how to stop giving these unspoken endorsements to people who caused a lot of suffering.

Update, 14 May 2018: Poll results from Twitter. 88% of people surveyed said they’d take money with the Rhodes name.

Picture from here.

Paying out of pocket

Anne Madden asked:

Academic scientists, how many of you have contributed significant out of pocket funds (or fam. $) to make your science happen?

 My newest paper cost me, personally, at least $5,919.21.

Every month for five years, I drove from Edinburg to Beach Access Road #6 on South Padre Island. Google Maps says that 92.2 miles, so that 184.4 miles round trip. Five years is 60 months, and the going rate for mileage reimbursement in Texas is $0.535.

92.2 miles × 2 × 5 × 12 × $0.535 / mile = $5,919.21.

And I know there are months I went more than once, so that is a conservative estimate. I also ate lunch on every one of those collecting trips. So maybe another $600 on top of that.

That project also involved family money, because my mom bought a new shovel when I was on the beach collecting and the one I was using broke.

It’s probably good if I don’t do this calculation very often.

I also paid out of pocket for this year’s American Society for Parasitologists meeting in San Antonio. The meeting was practically in my backyard (only a four hour drive; that’s close in Texas), so was relatively cheap (a drive to San Antonio is much less than a plane ticket). It was close to the end of the fiscal year (ours starts 1 September), and there is rarely travel money in the budget by then. Plus, there’s just less paperwork.

That said, I know I have it better, and I have reached a point of financial security where I can “opt out” of dealing with the torture that is university purchasing and reimbursement. Others are not so lucky. Here’s Holly Bik (lightly edited):

Serious proposal: If we want more minorities / first generation students to stay in science, we need to fix the travel reimbursement pyramid scheme.

I just found out that my university, University of California Riverside, can only prepay my conference registrations with a paper form (and it takes 3 weeks). Admins can’t pay anything travel-related with credit cards (they don’t have them). Seriously. It’s 2017. Everything is online.

I’m a first generation college student with $150,000 in student loan debt. And now UC Riverside wants me to pay more than $5,000 out of pocket for my work-related travel. For this summer’s conferences, I’ve probably paid more than $200 in credit card interest while waiting for reimbursements (money I don’t get back). Travel reimbursements varies across universities – some are pretty good. But UC Riverside is probably one of the worst I’ve experienced to date.

Sometimes there are the “perfect storms” of conference, workshop, etc., travel invites. And these are so important for early career people. So if you have money, you can travel for work (and suck up out of pocket expenses). And you meet people, build a network, have successful career. But if you are saddled with debt, you may forgo important opportunities because you just can’t eat up those travel costs. Your career suffers.

The biggest irony is that UC Riverside is proud of us first generation grads and faculty, but institutional bureaucracy works against us in horrible ways.

Institutional purchasing is terrible. And sometimes I think it’s bad on purpose, to drive people like me into paying for thing myself that the university should pay for, just because I don’t want to deal with the perpetual hassle and headaches of trying to fill out forms and get reimbursed.

Update, 29 September 2017:  Tara Smith contributes to the discussion.

From Bik’s thread, some places seem to be able to front costs–why can’t that be universal? It seems like a small thing when you have money, but for many struggling academics it’s the difference between “making it” and leaving the field.

Related posts

Indie spirit
Who paid for my open access articles?

External links

The high cost of academic reimbursement

Nevertheless, she persisted

Sometimes, you get to watch a friend win one. And that win is practically as sweet as one of your own.

Friend of the blog Dr. Becca has been getting a rough ride at tenure time. Until today:

THE PROVOST REVERSED HIS DECISION AND IS RECOMMENDING ME FOR TENURE

First things first: Congratulations, Becca! I am so happy for you! Wooo!

Other things: Becca’s win is important beyond just the obvious significance for her and her students and collaborators. It needs to be seen and discussed widely for two reasons.

First, her case needs to be talked about because the grief she was getting was all about one thing: money. Scratch that: it was because she didn’t get the right kind of money. Her job was being threatened because she hadn’t brought in a stand alone research grant from the National Institutes of Health (an NIH R01, to use the jargon).

Becca’s situation is the nightmare scenario that many early career scientists are staring down. The NIH budget is flat, applications are up, and most recognize that the success rate in applying for NIH grants is now so low that many perfectly good projects go unfunded.

In other words, getting a grant has a healthy dose of luck to it and no amount of granting savvy can ensure you will pull down any particular grant. Lack of a grant does not mean your colleagues don’t think you’re doing crummy science.

Becca’s situation shows how dire and destructive this habit of “outsourcing” tenure decisions to granting agencies has become. Professors and administrators need to talk about this and adjust their expectations to line up with reality, and not expect the stone to give blood if you “incentivize” the stone enough.

This is something that has been buzzing in the background for a long time, but the situation has worsened in the last 6-7 years. Academics are used to stability at much longer time scales and aren’t prepare to adjust to the ground shifting underfoot in the time it takes to hire a professor to her tenure review.

Second, Becca’s case matters more generally than her alone because, as Neil Gaiman (channeling G.K. Chesterton) says:

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Becca shows that you can fight the dragons of university administration, and you can win. And a lot of early career academics need to know that. Because dragons are big and scary and it is easy to give up and concede the battle.

Becca was confronted with career dragons.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Related posts

The secret life of a banner

The secret life of a banner, part 2

Can’t wait to see this in an “Acknowledgements” section

Making the rounds today is a new story that an adult entertainment website has provided a $25,000 research scholarship to Natalie Nevárez, a neurobiologist, to study monogamy. (Not mentioning the name of said website to try to prevent blog from being overridden with bots and spam.)

Congratulations to Natalie!

I would like to point out that in the last two months, adult entertainment websites have provided:

• Snow removal during a blizzard.
• Factual sex education. 
• And now, research funding.

These are small, token gestures, sure. But at this point, adult entertainment websites are showing a better understanding of civic responsibility than many elected politicians are. All of these used to be services that we expected to be provided largely by governments.

Update, 15 April 2017: A couple of people on Twitter noted that these sites do have problematic aspects to them, such as stolen content. I certainly don’t want to let these businesses off the hook for their bad practices. Ultimately, issues like “fair compensation of workers” matters more than a scholarship here or there.

But that they have made some of the gestures above kind of makes me wonder if they might smarten up.

These sites have also taken the lead on Internet security.

External links

A neurobiologist studying monogamy wins scholarship from porn site
Utah rejects sex education bill, so porn site redirects to instructional videos
Porn site says it will plow snow in Boston for free

 

Pay your interns

Matt Shipman pointed to a crowdfunding campaign for a student who wants to do an internship at NASA.

That’s horrible.

Internships should be work that give entry level experience. But the key word is “work.” If you don’t pay interns, you’re just exploiting them. And that’s wrong.

Spotting this on top of a university getting ready to destroy millions of museum specimens, and a new professor being criticized publicly for caring too much about teaching and outreach, make me feel like this about science culture, particularly academic science:

This bill would be bad for UTRGV students

Not much information yet, but here it is:

H.R.483 — 115th Congress (2017-2018)
All Bill Information (Except Text)

As of 01/24/2017 text has not been received for H.R.483 - To amend title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit the provision of funds under such title to institutions of higher education that violate the immigration laws, and for other purposes.

This bill appears to be aimed at punishing universities who provide education undocumented university students. Some of them are called “dreamers,” in reference to the DREAM act.

I think there’s little question that UTRGV has undocumented students. If UTRGV was hit by this legislation, that would mean, I think, no federal research grants. No money from National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, etc. That would seriously affect our chances of becoming an emerging research university.

External links

H.R.483

The anti-science administration

I’m quoted in this Times Higher Education article about the forecast for science under a new American political regime.

External links

Will ‘anti-science’ Trump harm US research?
Science Debate

Physics fraud

Well, this is an interesting reveal on the eve of UTRGV’s big flagship science and technology event, HESTEC. The physics department in the legacy institution, UT Brownsville, committed fraud with about $2 million worth of federal research money.

Not a good look, considering that the agencies they ripped off, like NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense, have traditionally been big partners in HESTEC. Indeed, NASA is an official supporter of this year’s event.

And this is not a low-profile case, either. It’s part of the team that was involved in the discovery of gravitational waves. And that’s one of the biggest findings in physics in decades.

The Monitor reports:

An audit from the UT System Office of Internal Audits found at least six federal research grants were overcharged for a total of $1,957,547.27 for the partial or full payment of salaries of faculty who were mainly teaching and not conducting research, a critical violation of grant conditions that could have potential impact on future grant considerations.

“Salaries were charged up to 100 percent of the federal grants even though their workload reflected a full teaching load in Physics,” the audit states.

These funds came from research grants awarded to the Center for Gravitation Wave Astronomy by National Aeronautic Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation-- two institutions that helped fund the center in 2003-- and the Department of Defense.

UTB notified the UT-System of at least three faculty members who were identified as being paid up to 100 percent of their salaries from research funds for multiple years, which was not part of the grant agreement.

“Center for Gravitation Wave Astronomy knowingly overcharged multiple research grants,” states the notification sent by UTB to the UT System Office of General Counsel. The department, referred to by audits as CGWA, was part of a recent national announcement in which gravitational waves had been detected, which is considered a huge scientific advancement in the field of physics.

The investigation revealed CGWA overcharged on six federal research grants from 2009 to 2015 to partially or fully pay the salaries of more than eight faculty members and some students. The investigation also concluded that the head of this department, CGWA Director Mario Diaz, was aware of the overcharges.

Of course, our institution’s president won’t promise that he will do anything about this:

When asked whether Diaz would keep his job, Bailey said he could not comment on personnel matters, but UT officials are still conducting an investigation and will send UTRGV officials the findings. Only then will any appropriate actions be taken.

After the creation of UTRGV, many administrative roles changed and some officials even retired, Bailey said. His main goal was to move forward and fully implement procedures that prevent these things from happening, especially now that the university is seeking more research funding.

“It was not under UTRGV’s watch,” Bailey said. “It’s important to us that we make sure that we have all of the processes in place so that it doesn’t happen again.”

My take is that Bailey seems the sort who subscribes to the “Do nothing and hope the problem goes away” school of university administration, and that he will be more concerned with preserving the institution’s image than whether or not anyone is made to pay for this blatant misuse of money. I expect he will try to wait this out and hope it blows over.

Oh wait, there’s more.

There’s another $3 million that the legacy institution has to pay back.

“We concluded that UTB’s benefits expenses for UTB and (Texas Southmost College) were incorrectly calculated and reported,” the audit states. “As a result, it was determined that the APS 011 reports needed to be recalculated for each institution separately.”

That second half is bad, although it isn’t as relevant to me personally as the first half. Faculty in my college, at my institution screwed up managing federal research money. I’ve gotten money from NSF before, but I think it just got a lot tougher. If I were at one of those agencies, I would be ready to blackball the institution.

And that money was probably going to be used for faculty pay increases. So because someone else misused money, I might be kissing my chance for a raise anytime soon goodbye.

External links

UTRGV forced to repay $5 million in funding on behalf of UTB

Our med school is not going smoothly

Earlier this year, the UTRGV medical school had its dean step down for reasons unknown.

Now, one of the communities is backing out of its financial commitment to the medical school, making it the second local city to do so.

And one of the university’s prominent supporters, a Texas senator, says the medical school is, “Not okay.”

“The medical school is not okay. I don’t think people really realize how much money it costs and how complicated it is to create a new medical school,” Hinojosa told the Rio Grande Guardian. “The type of equipment that it needs, the type of infrastructure support that it needs to be successful. We cannot do a top-notch job unless we get support and help from the community.”

Basically, there is wrangling about taxes to support the medical school, and there is a vote on the November ballot about it.

Yeah. The new medical school was supposed to be the jewel in the crown of the new university. It’s not looking so shiny right now.

External links

Feud over hospital district prompts Mission to pull support for UTRGV medical schoolFrancisco Fernandez leaving leadership role, will remain on school faculty
Why is McAllen reneging on funds to UTRGV School of Medicine?
Cigarroa: Healthcare Districts are ‘an important piece of the puzzle’
Hinojosa: UTRGV medical school is not okay

Is there any money you won’t take?

Here’s a picture of UTRGV president Guy Bailey from a little over a week ago, doing what he’s doing in a lot of pictures: agreeing to take money. Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration. There wasn’t a cheque from NextDecade, the other party in this agreement. Instead, the press release says this is a:

(S)trategic partnership to foster STEM-based (science, technology, engineering and math) education programs,facilitate research and job training opportunities for UTRGV students, and promote collaboration between academia and industry(.)

This is not just yesterday’s news, it’s last week’s news. Why am I blogging about this now? Because I missed it. It wasn’t on the university’s home page. It wasn’t in the daily news email we all get. No administrator – not my chair, not my dean, nobody – mentioned it, even though, as a STEM faculty, I should be one of the people potentially affected, nay, benefiting from this partnership, because it’s for STEM education, right? It snuck past my radar, almost as though the university isn’t proud of this partnership. Hm...

The partnership is with NextDecade, a company proposing to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in the region. Here’s how the Sierra Club describes it:

If built, the Rio Grande LNG export terminal would be the largest single source of air pollution in Cameron County, according to its expected emissions. Its construction would require filling in hundreds of acres of wetlands in an area that is critical habitat for the endangered ocelot and Aplomado falcon. There are also concerns that the view of the industrial landscape and associated pollution could threaten the Valley’s beach and nature tourism industries.

The Brownsville Herald reports (my emphasis)

UTRGV declined to address the controversial aspect of local LNG projects. In an emailed response to The Brownsville Herald’s request for comment on that aspect, university spokesman Patrick Gonzales wrote only that “UTRGV is excited about the education opportunities this NextDecade LLC partnership provides, especially in the STEM fields, for our students.”

UTRGV is going to deal with community controversy by pretending it doesn’t exist. That is not the way to build trust with your community.

Calling this partnership a boon for “STEM education” is too generous. This will be a partnership for TE education. I doubt there will be anything for science or math students or faculty. This might be for engineers.

It’s also coming at a time when many other universities are divesting from fossil fuels.

Is there any money our president won’t take?

Bailey has more or less said that he sees money as the solution to all the university’s problems. When he started, he accepted money from the food industry for diabetes and obesity research. That’s a conflict of interest. This NextDecade partnership is also rife with potential conflicts of interest. I wonder what would happen if biology faculty started doing research on those endangered species whose habitats could be affected by the LNG export terminal?
 A lot of old UTPA signs were swapped out for UTRGV ones last week when the semester started. Maybe they should have looked like this:

Related posts

Show me what you value
H.E.B.’s donation to UTRGV: the gift that keeps on conflicting

External links

NextDecade partnership with UTRGV aims to stimulate STEM-based learning and boost local economy
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Makes Agreement with Rio Grande LNG. Students, Community Leaders Wont Have It
Students, environmentalists, criticize UTRGV education agreement with LNG firm
UTRGV and NextDecade sign MOU

Show me what you value

My dad used to have an expression: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” - Joe Biden

Press releases, liked budgets, are often uncomfortably honest revelations into what institutions value. With that in mind, consider this tweet from UT System about UTRGV’s first year:

Philanthropy: Up 530%
Research expenditures: Up 56%
Student applications: Up 21%

Based on this, the UT System values money above all.

This is consistent with comments UTRGV president Guy Bailey made to faculty last year. He said he was often asked about what problems the new university was facing. He said, roughly (not a direct quote) that he told people, “I don’t have any problems that money can’t solve.” And indeed, the rest of his presentation talked about how UTRGV could get more money from the state by optimizing patterns of student enrollment. The main times I have seen our president in the news have been when he’s accepting money from donors.

The longer press release is a bit better. The first bullet in the list is student retention rate. That is indeed something to be proud of, considering that retention was something the legacy institutions struggled with. But the next two items on the list are about money.

Realted posts

What does an institution brag about?

External links

UTRGV off to a stellar start in historic first year
UTRGV receives largest donation in RGV higher education history, names business college in honor of Robert C. Vackar

It doesn’t matter if the Ice Bucket Challenge gave us a “breakthrough” or not

We are in the middle of a science news hype cycle.

First, the inflated expectations. Lots of news sources reporting that funds from the Ice Bucket Challenge were used to make a “breakthrough” in ALS. Note that the original press release didn’t say “breakthrough” anywhere in the headline or the main text. It said a “significant... discovery” was made.

We’re now in the trough of disappointment. Serious science journalists are poo-poohing the claim that the results reported can be described as a “breakthrough.” Some are warning that just proves this whole crowdfunding thing is a dangerous idea. Boing Boing, for instance:

As useful as the funds raised by the Ice Bucket Challenge are, they can’t replace the big, institutional, steady spending that has been under assault since the Reagan era.

I’m right with people saying that neither pretentious press releases nor hyperexcited news coverage do us much good.

But I worry that downplaying good new research (which as far as I can see, everyone admits this was) because it’s not a “breakthrough” accidentally reinforces the notion that only the “breakthroughs” matter. It also implies that because the results are not a “breakthrough,” that they are trivial findings. Of course, the “not a breakthrough” article admits:

This is intriguing and important research.

Guys, if you’re going to criticize press coverage for bombastic headlines and burying the qualifiers and nuance near the end of the story, I think it’s fair to ask for the same in return.

Focusing on the resulting science also buries some of the less tangible benefits of the crowdfunding campaign. People had fun with the Ice Bucket Challenge. People might have learned what ALS was for the first time. Scientists got to do their research were less likely to shut their labs down. Those are positive benefits regardless of whether the money raised led to any particular scientific outcome.

I’ve seen the argument that crowdfunding somehow poses a threat to federal funding since I got involved with #SciFund. What’s been missing every time I see this claim is any actual evidence. I have yet to hear one politician say something like, “We’re thinking of cutting funding to ALS research because we saw the Ice Bucket Challenge was a big success.”

All I see is fear. And I get that fear. Many people’s labs and careers have depended on federal funds for so long that anything that gives the hint of deviating from the cry of “MOAR funding!” is open for criticism.

But what else are we supposed to do?

Yes, we’re supposed to advocate for our science to politicians. We’re supposed to communicate our discoveries to the broader public. We do that. And, in the United States, all that advocacy over more than a decade has yielded us... 

A set of flat research budgets in real dollars (check the “nondefense” line). Labs shutting down, and an endless stream of complaints about the amount of time spent trying to get money for research instead of doing research.

It’s frustrating to be told that scientists should not even try any other plan because it might threaten the plan that is not making any progress, even after more than ten years.

Related posts

What the Coburn report has in common with arsenic life

External links

Here's the Exact Way That the Ice Bucket Challenge Helped ALS Research (from September 2015)
Remember the ice bucket challenge? It just funded an ALS breakthrough
Ice Bucket Challenge “breakthrough”? Experts pour cold water on superficial reporting
The Ice Bucket Challenge did not fund a breakthrough in ALS treatment
Federal Budget Authority for R&D in FYs 2014 and 2015 Turns Modestly Upward, but Extent of Increase in FY 2016 Uncertain

Hello Atlantic! Here are my answers to your questions about funding

The Atlantic recently ran an article about science funding that asked for scientists to write in and answer three questions. So, I did. These were my answers.

How did those years of flat (National Institutes of Health, NIH) funding affect you or your colleagues, if at all?

The difficulty in attracting funding affected our students. When I took students to conferences who were considering looking for doctoral positions, they were disheartened by how much of the talk was about whether a lab could get funding.

Flat NIH didn’t affect me or my colleagues much, for two reasons.

1. My university is an emerging research institution, so there is not a huge amount of federal funding in general. Faculty here haven’t reached the point of being competitive for the stand alone R01 research grants that are the bread and butter of many biomedical research labs.
2. My department is not a biomedical department. The National Science Foundation and other organizations are generally better funding fits than the NIH for us. (And it is a bit annoying when reports treat the NIH as if is was the only funding agency for all of biology. There are huge swathes of biology that NIH doesn’t touch.) 

Have you even noticed the 2016 increase?

Nope.

(Other researchers often get annoyed at me when I say declining funding rates haven't affected me personally. They badly want to show solidarity, and impress on people that the funding shortfalls are hurting science – which they are, and I agree with. But it doesn’t affect all of us equally.)

And what would more funding mean to you?

My institution is determined to add many new doctoral programs, including biology. I’good thing that would creating new opportunities for underserved minority students in my region, instead of this:
ve had many discussions with my colleagues about whether this is a good idea, given the steady decline in funding success rates. More funding might convince me that a new doctoral program could be a

Additional: Moments after I posted this complaining how NIH is so often presented as the only game in town for biology funding, what do I see but a tweet from the Society for Neuroscience presenting NIH as the only game in town for biology funding. Sheesh.

Contact your representatives today and ask them to make the case for a strong research funding level for NIH.

If you’re going to all the trouble of contacting your federal representative to support neuroscience, why not mention other agencies that fund that discipline? Like the National Science Foundation?

Related posts

Happy sequestration

External links

NIH Funding: It’s Personal

Research underemployment

In general, people in science get doctoral degrees because they want to do science. But the opportunities to do so after grad school and post-docs have shrunk dramatically.

Karen James wrote about the prospects of being an unsupported scientist. Shortly after, Terry McGlynn talked about the prospect of self-funding research. Both are expressions of a common frustration: more people are getting trained to do science, but after that “training period” is over, there’s less money for research per scientist than there used to be. It’s getting tighter and tighter, with no end in sight.

While I was turning this over in my mind, two questions came to me.

Who is to blame?

The answer, of course, is nobody is to blame. Funding agencies, states, and universities each have their own, often contradictory, sets of goals and incentives. On science social media, most of the talk rotates around the policies federal funding agencies, neglecting the role of the states, incentives for institutions, and that some trends occur with no help from funding agencies. (For instance, those agency policies don’t seem to account for the growth in master’s degrees.)

The last one – institutional incentives – is is not looked at enough. If I were a university president, even knowing the oversupply problem, if I had a chance to create more doctoral programs, I would do it. There are just too many advantages. You get higher university rankings and more money.

For instance, look at the Carnegie classifications of universities. Their first pass on classifying universities as research (R1, R2, R3) is based on the number of doctoral programs. In my state, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board groups universities by the number of graduate programs, number of graduate students, and research expenditures. (The last is another potentially corrosive influence.)

Why is number of graduate programs and students used to measure research output? It assumes that faculty perform no research outside of supervising doctoral students. Why not number of publications or scholarly products? Universities collect that data. Heck, I’ve lost count of the number of times my university has asked me for my CV.

Obviously, there are potential pitfalls in systems intended to measure academic productivity. But consider what would change if universities were classified more by what research they put out instead of how many training programs and students they have.

Using the number of doctoral programs as a proxy measurement for amount of research capacity of a university is like using the Impact Factor as a proxy measurement for the quality of research articles: deeply, if not fatally flawed for most purposes, but survives because it’s convenient. The difference is there’s no shortage of researchers, editors, and others writing articles and editorials pointing out that the limits of Impact Factors.


Why are there so few solutions suggested to address these problems? 

Everyone likes to support “training.” Nobody’s going to get fired for putting money into training, since education is one of those rare areas that pretty much everyone wants to be seen supporting.

People with doctorates have some of the lowest unemployment rates in the U.S. There’s very little concept of underemployment and no balance sheet for missed opportunities. That makes it a tough sell to convince politicians that people with a Ph.D. are a group in crisis.

Like the weather, everyone talks about Ph.D. oversupply, but nobody know what to do about it besides dressing for today and hoping it’ll chance to something nicer soon.

External links

Karen James’s Twitter rant
Self-funding your research program
Refusing to be measured
In the future, all research will be funded by Taco Bell

Grand challenges for biology

Meghan Duffy, writing at Dynamic Ecology, has a nice post about “grand challenges” in biology. The first time I heard this particularly phrase was at a Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting, where the National Science Foundation was soliciting ideas about what the “grand challenges” in biology are. In other words, this is grant speak.

I have some misgivings about this approach, of asking scientists what they big problems are. I think it’s too likely to be blinkered and limited: like asking city dwellers at the end of the nineteenth century what problems they needed to solve. They’d probably have been adamant about needed more and better horses for transportation.

The NSF has five grand challenges for biology, and so does Meghan. There is some overlap in these lists, but they aren’t quite identical.

• Predicting individual organisms’ characteristics from their DNA sequence (NSF) / Linking phenotype to genotype (MD)
• Understanding biodiversity (NSF and MD)
• Understanding the brain (NSF and MD)
• Interactions of the Earth, its climate and its biosphere (NSF)
• Sustainable agriculture (MD)
• Synthesizing life-like systems (NSF)
• Origins of life (MD)

To me, “grand challenge” has a few desirable features. It should be something that many people in the discipline are actively working on. That is, it’s a question many scientists are engaged and committed to answering. There are some reasonably clear ideas for what constitutes success.

For those reasons, a couple of the proposed grand challenges leave me cold.

“Understanding the brain” is, to me, is not a challenge for biology. Neuroscience is its own discipline now. The descriptions of “the brain” – singular – make it clear that people are talking about the human brain, and not the brains of the millions of other animal species.

Worse, the NSF document talks about the “emergent properties” of the brain, which is code for “consciousness.” I don’t think we have even a clue as to what an answer to that question might look like.

“Origins of life” is an unanswered question, yes, and an important one. For a grand challenge, it doesn’t feel like one that a large proportion of people in biology are actively grappling with. There’s a lot of speculation, but I don’t see this as something that people think they have a clear path to make headway on it.

“Synthesizing life-like systems” is a weird way of renaming a technology – synthetic biology – as a challenge. I’m not so much interested in life-like systems as I am in actual living systems studied with techniques to (say) make synthetic DNA.

When the J. Craig Venter Institute announced they had created a cell that ran from artificial DNA, Venter said one of the questions they wanted to answer is, “What’s the minimal genome?” What is the smallest amount of instructions that you can have that will allow a cell to be alive? That’s a fascinating question, but unless / until a lot more labs start pursuing it besides the J. Craig Venter Institute, I don’t think it qualifies as a
grand challenge.

“Understanding biodiversity” is something that I can get behind, although I’d like it even more if it was a bit more focused. Something like, “How many species are there?” We don’t know that. It would be nice to see basic taxonomy put more in the forefront, because that stuff needs more attention. And just cataloguing all the species is a grand challenge.

External links

How many species are there?

The Journal of Funding Agency

An argument in scientific publishing is, “Who pays?” For many journals run by traditional, for-profit publishers, usually the library pays. For many open access online journals, the author pays.

Scientists don’t want to pay out of pocket. This is a legitimate concern, because the article processing charges can be thousands of dollars (though not all are). Many have argued that funding agencies should ultimately be the ones who pay, because they are sponsoring the research, and they have a vested interest in seeing the research published as widely as possible.

Many agencies have taken up this cause, and have polices that require open access publication.

Still... this seems a long and needlessly complicated path for the money to take. Researchers have to write grants, budget for an unknown number of papers, which then have to go to the journal.

Why don’t funding agencies start their own open access journals?

The rule would be simple: If you have research supported by the funding agency, it’s free to publish open access in that agency’s journal.

If your research is supported by other agencies, you’d pay an article fee.

I wonder if funding agencies might actually save money by having their own publishing arms. They wouldn’t have to worry about the budgeting for the publication fees. It would simplify both the writing and review of grant proposals.

Most funding agencies already have the infrastructure to publish stuff. After all, they publish reports and calls for proposal and so on all the time. They have connections to peer reviewers, because they use them to review grant proposals.

Some government agencies have had their own journals for a long time. Canada’s NRC Research Press is one example. I don’t know those journals payment system, although I think most are using the “library pays” subscription model. It might have the potential to be “house publisher” for scientists with Canadian federal funding.

HHMI, The Wellcome Trust, and the Max Planck Institute got into the publishing end of things with eLife. But they are just “supporting” the journal, rather than it being in house. There may be advantages to this, mainly editorial independence.

Update, 23 March 2017: The Gates Foundation is taking up this idea. They are creating something called Gates Open Research. The news article is interesting because it variously called this a publishing “venture” and “platform” rather than a journal.

External links

Gates Foundation announces open-access publishing venture

Photo by Steven Depolo on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

H.E.B.’s donation to UTRGV: the gift that keeps on conflicting

This was the scene last week, when H.E.B., a chain of grocery stores that runs through Texas and Mexico, donated a million dollars to the planned new UTRGV South Texas Diabetes & Obesity Institute.

It’s all very festive and season and everyone is playing off the Santa theme.

My reaction was more like this:

The H.E.B. donation creates a possible conflict of interest for UTRGV researchers.

Let’s start by stipulating that where money for research comes from matters. There is a large body of research on this. Ben Goldacre has documented a lot about the relationship between corporate funding and research results in his book, Bad Pharma. Here's a soundbite that is close to the bottom line (emphasis added):

(I)ndustry-funded trials are four times more likely to give a positive result than independently sponsored trials.

Given that the source of research funding can affect what results are ultimately published, what are possible problems here?

H.E.B. is part of the food industry. They don’t just distribute and sell other people’s food, either: they have their own in-house brands. This means they have vested interests in research results on diabetes and obesity. What they make, what they sell, and how their stores are laid out (their checkout isles are loaded with soft drinks and chocolate bars), all have implications both for their profitability and for public health, as this paper notes:

Retail food environments are considered influential in determining dietary behaviours and health outcomes.

On the surface, it’s hard to tell if this donation was made because H.E.B. wants to be on the right side of this issue, or whether it’s a public relations whitewash that is cheaper than actually changing their business practices in the service of public health.

Even if the donation was given in good faith, the H.E.B. donation may strongly influence the kind of research questions that the Institute can ask.

The South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute hasn’t published any research yet, but a research team has been recruited. It’s to be led by Sarah Williams-Blangero, whose CV lists her research interests as genetic epidemiology, infectious diseases (which diabetes is not), genetic management, and nonhuman primate genetics.

“Diabetes” and “obesity” are notable for their absence. In fact, out of over 100 publications listed on her CV, not one mentions “diabetes” or “obesity”in its title.

How interesting.

So what will the Diabetes and Obesity Institute publish research on? It isn’t clear yet, but it does not look good for someone who wanted to study the health impacts of certain kinds of food availability, social influences, advertising, and so on.

There have been cases like this before. American Academy of Family Physicians got sponsorship from Coca-Cola. The American Dietetic Association was criticized for accepting sponsorship from Hershey’s, the chocolate maker. This post on the latter mirrors my concerns:

I don’t doubt that the ADA has good intentions- they likely perceive sponsorships as potential to change corporate behaviors, working with them instead of against.  But it is a huge conflict of interest, and there is a high risk that the companies will use the partnership to improve their image - here is Hershey already using it (and RDs) to tell the public that their chocolate products are ok - never-mind doses or which types, or the other ingredients that may come with it.

In an email, Travis Saunders (who blogs at Obesity Panacea) noted that the food industry often funds research related to obesity in some way (particularly exercise), but that there are no particular guidelines for health researchers in navigating the potential conflicts of interest. That there are no guidelines doesn’t mean everyone’s okay with this: there is contention among research in the area.

What would I like to see done about this? I am not saying that UTRGV should give back the money. First, I would like to see any research coming out of the Institute list the H.E.B. funding, and include it in their “conflict of interest” section in every paper and poster they publish.

Second, I want a real discussion about this among the university community. I find it a bit disturbing that they made this announcement in the week after final exams, when many students and faculty have already left campus, and there is not probably going to be much chance for discussion in university bodies like the faculty senate until late January.

UTPA and UTB were mainly teaching institutions, and did not get large amounts of research money. But as we transition to UTRGV, and to becoming a research university, we may need to give a lot more thought to what are acceptable funding sources and conflict of interest guidelines.

It’s not fun playing Grinch to this announcement, but maybe it is necessary. This may be more of a lump of coal than a gift.

Additional, 29 December 2014: Fit Academic adds some more perspective (lightly edited):

Hard, because much obesity and diabetes research funded by food or pharma. Invited to collaborate on grant funded by Coke. Said no, but funding is limited. Sometimes it’s food and pharma money or no money at all.

Conflict of interest isn’t an all or nothing thing; there’s obviously gradations. I think the next question is, how do we manage these possible conflicts? I think full disclosure is a good first step.

Update, 8 March 2016: I haven’t forgotten you, sucker! Vox magazine has a good article about how the food industry influences research.

Related posts

Protesting ethics 

External links

Obesity Panacea blog
Expanding the Definition of Conflict of Interest - Big Food Edition
A note on the ADA, corporate sponsorship, and PepsiGate

Pics from H.E.B. presentation here and here.

“We’d probably have [insert thing needed now] if not for budget cuts”

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said about the prospects for an Ebola vaccine:

Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.

Collins's statement gives me the heebie-jeebies. I kind of doubt that an Ebola vaccine is something we’d “probably” have by now, funding or not. (Though I am too far away from vaccine development to have a good sense of the state of play - maybe research on Ebola is more advanced than I think.)

We should not base arguments for science funding on specific promises for specific goodies, because a lot of things science promised never materialized. People will never stop asking where there jetpacks and flying cars are. More seriously, people ask why we still can’t cure cancer, more 40 years after President Nixon started what became known as the “war on cancer.” Unmet promises burns scientists.

Perhaps a better argument (which I saw on Twitter, can’t recall who): We need the NIH to develop things like Ebola vaccines, because private industry probably has no profit motive to do so.

Additional: Of course, I wrote all of the above before I saw that a Canadian-led Ebola vaccine is now in human trials. Maybe Collins’s statement was based on better knowledge than I had.

But darn it, it still sounds like a fairly calculated ploy to use current events to lobby for a bigger budget.

More additional, 14 October 2014: Michael Eisen reaches a similar conclusion to mine:

(I)t’s time to call this for what it is: complete bullshit. ...

(E)ven if you believe the only thing holding up development of the Ebola vaccine was funds, it’s still false to argue that with more money we’d have an Ebola vaccine. Vaccine and drug development just simply doesn’t work this way.

Update, 16 October 2014: Justin Kiggins points out that Collins’s argument backfired in an entirely predictable way. A major international newspaper and an American politician has pulled a trick American politicians have used for years:

1. Look through titles of grants.
2. Find grants that look obvious or silly.
3. Do not contact researchers in charge of grants or read grants.
4. Argue that agency wastes taxpayer money.

Sigh.

Update, 19 October 2014: Other officials in the NIH are disagreeing with their director. This quote is from Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, this morning:

“I don’t think you can say we would or would not have that. Everything has slowed down but I would not make that statement” that higher funding would have led to a vaccine by now(.)

Related posts

Promises versus trust

External links

Ebola Vaccine Would Likely Have Been Found By Now If Not For Budget Cuts: NIH Director
NIH Director Francis Collins’ ridiculous “We would have had an Ebola vaccine if the NIH were fully funded” meme
NIH Director throws basic research under the bus to score Ebola points. It backfires.