Making Of A Scientist

From Chapter 25:

True scientists are not made, they are born. However, there are many people who can do well in science even though they did not show any natural curiosity in their youth. I would like to talk about the most passionate ones and the change that happens in grad school. Right now the best science is done in the US. Many students come to the US on F1 visa. I am sure many of you were some of those students. They are excited to live in the US, achieve something and, in many cases, they would like to stay and become professors. After the initial euphoria has passed, the reality sets in. They experience a lack of guidance, “professors” who can’t teach (most of them are like that) and endless projects that suck the life out of people but do not necessarily turn out to be worth the effort. The lack of guidance is not the worst thing that can happen, although it slows down someone who is full of optimism and energy. What should be done is to foster that optimism, not start killing it from day one. The moment they set foot in the lab, they are forced to limit themselves to thinking and acting within the boundaries of the daily experiment. Rare are those who can see the big picture. As for attending interesting courses, people get bored, as most professors can’t teach. Even though one would assume that a professor is someone who teaches people, it looks like that in our biomedical field, we gave the term a whole new meaning. What is a professor? A grant writer and a slave driver. The validity of the latter title greatly depends on the individual style of the person in charge, but it is usually true. The person who teaches full time is called a lecturer and you look down on those people. Who gives you the right to do so? Oh, I know, your ego! I have seen so much reluctance in people calling themselves professors to teach half a semester. They even say it out loud as if it is a curse. “They twisted my arm. I need to teach this semester,” an established professor at my former department said. Everything is subordinate to so-called research that delivering knowledge and motivating people is secondary. Who will then take on the task of conducting research later on? The same people who did not receive proper training? Luckily, this is not the main problem. Nowadays when libraries are like morgues, the Internet makes up for everything. Knowledge is out there for those who want to learn and can’t learn from the people who are supposed to teach them. So why aren’t professors capable of teaching? I am sure you know. The selection for the position of professor is done based on pretty much all factors other than the ability to teach. I will talk about this later. So what happens when students experience all this right away? If they survive, it makes them stronger and more independent. The problem is that after about 3 years in grad school there is very little for people to learn if they stay in the same lab. They get caught in the apparently endless loop of experiment repetition. A third year graduate student is already well-trained. Then he or she becomes cheap labor for another two, three or, God forbid, four years. It is not in the student’s best interest to repeat experiments until the project is “done,” as they are usually never done. Professors wouldn’t let go of cheap labor so easily. Yes, they are trained now, but there is a requirement to complete the thesis and the thesis depends on results and the results depend on how well their boss was able to envision the project and create a cohesive story for the dissertation. It is true that a PhD implies a significant contribution to science. At the same time, that PhD is also a personal responsibility of the professor guiding the students. One can’t expect a student to contribute significantly to science if they are lead by blind or stressed-out people. The professors are usually stressed-out and in a state of panic if they have just started out their careers, so they need to come up with a great story that will bring money into the lab. If professors are older and established, they are frequently careless and preoccupied by traveling to conferences, attending other administrative meetings or even preoccupied with students on a level other than professional. This group is not that numerous but it does exist. I have seen it with my own eyes. Overall, not many people care too much about students. Everyone is guided by their own selfish interests. I have personally witnessed pressure on a student whose graduation was dependent on finding a receptor that the professor needed in order to make his startup company more attractive to investors. Is this ethical? Why are people like this allowed to use public funding and link graduation requirements to a selfish interest in making money? Isn’t this an obvious abuse of the system? How is this academia? Why is this legal? How many of you are doing this to your students? The success of students and postdocs is frequently not measured well. As most professors burn through postdocs and don’t care much about students, when the project is finally done, the credit goes to the people who are there at the right time. All those who toiled for years to amass the data may not be mentioned, while the lucky ones will get the credit and appear successful as if it was all their work. A person like that may be socially intelligent as well, so after graduating with a big paper and getting a glowing letter o recommendation he or she can land a job in academia. Down the line it would hurt them if they were not competent enough, but I am sure you are aware how credit is given and how unfair the system is when it comes to this. I hope that you can see that grad school is the first level in this game where players get eliminated. I am not talking about those students who should not be there in the first place, but people who are able to contribute to science, yet who already start realizing that something with the system is wrong and leave. Many of them try their best to work for industry where they can sell their skills and souls for a bigger salary. They lose interest in contributing to science. Is all this bad? No? No worries, it gets worse.