I can be very morbid. Recently, I’ve become interested in epitaphs. These short phrases are chosen by the deceased or their closest love ones to be etched into their tombstones.

They range from depressing to touching to humorous.

Robert Frost: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world”.
Emily Dickinson: “Called back”
Oscar Wilde: “Alien tears will fill for him/ Pity’s long-broken ern/For his mourners will be outcast men,/and outcasts always morn.”
Winston Churchill: “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter”
Hank Williams: “I’ll never get out of this world alive”
Virginia Woolf: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding o Death!”

The poet John Keats, feeling very down on himself, requested that his tombstone be inscribed with, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”. He believed he had made no impression on the planet. His friends gave him his wish, but they added a qualifier at the beginning, “This grave contains all that was mortal, of a young English poet, who on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these word to be engraven on his tomb stone”.

Why do I think these are interesing? They are like a little glimpse into the values of these people and their life philosophies.

The one that particular touches me is the one chosen for Sylvia Plath by her husband Ted Hughs.
“Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted”.
What a compliment.

Don’t we just have the best job in the world? Yes, yes, I just passed my comprehensive exam and these could just be the witterings of a sleep-deprived maniac. In my defense, though, I’ve said this in less exceptional circumstances. When I last returned to England those friends of mine that are also PhD students seemed shocked (and perhaps even a little appalled) by how cool I thought my job was.

I lay in bed last night, totally unable to sleep, thinking about what was said in the exam. Briefly, I rested my thoughts on something Andrew said to me as we ‘debriefed’, he had concluded from one discussion that ‘nobody really has a clue what we’re doing’. What an amazing thing! Five professors and I in a room and nobody really knows what the answer is. At moments it felt like we were going somewhere completely new. I was reminded of something my dad, who is a statistician, used to tell me as a child – that mathematics was creative, in spite of the impression I got in the classroom. How true that is for all sciences and how little it is appreciated.

In a thankless effort to put myself to sleep, I read an article in The New Yorker by a journalist who is a restless lover of travel, who, like me, is obsessed with seeing the world. All I could think was what an adventure Science is too.

Ron Currie Jr. would say everything. To some extent, this is true: everything could matter. As scientists how do we identify what does? And prioritize the things that do?

We live in a society where criminals are innocent until proven guilty, hypotheses are possible until proven wrong, and it seems like nothing matters until it does. Andrew shared with me an article this week on biases in scientific publications that discusses the trends of which we are all aware: negative results don’t get published, sex of subjects is rarely considered, and temperature and potentially important environmental factors are never reported. I agree with the author of the article that this is a problem. Much money and resources are likely being wasted testing hypotheses that have repeatedly given negative results. Negative-result experiments rendered their pursuers paperless while leaving future generations of scientists ignorant of what hasn’t worked in the past and what pet hypotheses they should get rid of before starting. When we suppress the sharing of negative results, I think we do a disservice to the community and forget the original rationale of starting the experiment. Experiments should not be started unless there is proper reasoning behind the hypothesis. Ethics should not allow animal models to be used if sound rationale were absent. This being the case, negative results should be informative and thus a helpful contribution to our field. However, as in journalism, television, and (most likely) life, our thirst for sensationalism quells that which we find boring. Negative results can be boring.

Boring-ness aside, there seems to be something else driving trends in research. We want to publish things that matter which brings me to the title of this post. What matters?

More and more review articles seem to be a call to arms for more complex models to consider parameters we previously ignored. Environmental factors, life history, age structure, immunity, social grouping, stress, the list goes on. If everything could matter, what matters most?

I think physicists have been struggling with this question since their field began. In Newtonian mechanics, if we knew exactly what mattered, we could theoretically predict every outcome every time. Because we don’t know what matters, we replace knowledge with probabilities based on past outcomes. In other fields of science, we theoretically should be able to predict the future if we know all the parameters at play (unless you are in the Heisenberg camp). The problem is figuring out the mattering from the not-mattering. In malaria, we don’t know exactly what matters in determining whether or not an individual will get sick. Until we do, how do we know what to report? How much of a problem is it that many studies have biased sex-ratios, poorly describe environmental conditions or use stable temperatures?

I think a solution could be found in doing more simple science to establish what matters most in the majority of model systems, and also in establishing better standards of reporting experimental subject and design details, especially by making use of online supplements. When we don’t know what could be important, I’ll agree with Mr. Currie and assume that everything matters.

The first time that somebody called me Dr. Sternberg was the day I defended. I was sitting on the floor in the hall outside the room where my committee was deliberating (or more likely, talking about something completely unrelated). The door opened, I sprang up, and my advisor held out his hand and said “congratulations Dr. Sternberg.”

That was over a year ago, and since then I can probably count on my fingers the number of times I’ve been called doctor. With the exception of e-mails from journal editors, the title is usually an instant spam flag in my inbox.

Like a number of my peers, I’m disinclined to use the title. Most of the time it’s unnecessary and, to err on the side of not coming off like an asshole, I generally don’t. The only time I use the title is directly following some obviously bad advice, as in “trust me, I’m a doctor.”

After attending a large conference this past week, however, I’ve decided that it might be time to start using the title more frequently. Not on personal communications or in situations where I might be mistaken for a medical doctor but next time I’m registering for a conference, I will check the “PhD” box. I don’t think it should make a difference in how people treat you but in certain situations – like at a big conference where everyone immediately checks out your name tag – it does seem to matter. If for no other reason then to avoid yet another awkward conversation where I have to decide if and how to politely mention that I’m not actually a grad student.

Bonus link: this post wouldn’t be complete without a reminder to brush that dirt off your shoulders.

It makes sense to me why a pair of pants (American English) is called a pair of pants.  According to a webpage I read once, in the original design of pants, people would where two separate fabric sleeves each called a pantaloon, and tie the two pantaloons together at the waist, thus making a pair of pantaloons, later shortened to pants.

But what I don’t understand is why the word “mathematics” is plural, or “statistics”, “physics”, or “economics”.  I would be able to accept that it just is, if it wasn’t for the fact that “chemistry” and “psychology”, for example, are singular.  To make things even crazier “biology” is singular, but “the life sciences” is plural.  Aren’t those just two different phrases for the same thing?  How can one be singular and the other plural?

If I was in charge of remaking the English language, I would demand more consistency.

Two gametocytes in the same red blood cell (bottom left) and two misery-causing forms also infecting the same cell (upper right).

What makes a good scientific story–also known as a publishable unit? I appreciate stories with nice, straightforward themes about how living things work, but my tastes run more to long and convoluted stories that capture a substantial chunk of the biological complexity. Those are the stories I try to write as well, and it does not go quickly. At the moment I’m hesitating over a story about how we measure what malaria parasites invest into transmission. It’s critical to know how much of the liberated host resources go into transmission: Malaria has specialized forms called gametocytes that get passed onto mosquitoes, but it’s the other parasite stages that make people sick. In other words, what parasites invest into transmission they cannot also invest into causing human misery. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to figure out what parasites are investing into transmission because we can’t identify precisely when parasites have committed to transmission–we can only detect parasites that have long since committed to becoming transmission forms. I have a model that provides a perfect opportunity to test out the ways we calculate transmission investment, and it suggests that we can’t say exactly what we want to about transmission, for example that parasites are investing 10% into transmission at day 8. I’ve been reluctant to start writing the story because I don’t know the ending. I’ve made an attempt to derive a more sophisticated method of calculating transmission investment, but it performed abysmally on my simulated data. I don’t want to write a story that says current methods are flawed, but that I have nothing better to offer. My plan is to write it the story as an opinion piece (at which point it should be clear how I should have written it). Please comment if you have any advice on opinion pieces, and once I have a draft I’ll be getting feedback from folks on whether I sound too much like a Debby Downer.

Last week was officially my last week as Andrew´s postdoc. Truly last this time round, though with much work still left undone, this won´t be a goodbye message. I´ve learned a lot over the nine (!!) years since I started in his lab as an MSc student. One of these things is to go out and network. I believe it is a very important skill in science. It is something that comes more naturally to some than others, but it is definitely a skill that can be learned, though it will require courage.

What will you do? Seize the opportunity or hide in the bathroom?

I again realized the importance of this during a meeting I attended over the past two days. It was a small international meeting on the topic of antibiotic resistance, extremely interesting. At the same time, I felt very much out of depth in this crowd of mostly clinicians, hardly understanding the field-specific language of abbreviations for any bacteria, antibiotic, mutation, cut off point they know. In addition, I hardly knew a single soul at the meeting. Would I have just attended the meeting, I would´ve learned some interesting facts about antibiotic resistance and some references to key papers. However, I gathered up my courage to chat to some important people over coffee break and asked a few questions that led to a long discussion over lunch with some other important people (one of whom, by the way, was telling me after I confessed I hardly knew anything about bacteria and more about malaria, that malaria research can have some really interesting insights in drug treatments in general, referring to our PNAS and PLoS Path papers, TADAAA moment!) and learned so much more. Now, I feel like these two days were time well spend (while I know I could´ve worked on important MS´s that need to get finished, I know Andrew…).

This networking thing absolutely doesn´t come natural to me. I have to convince myself that these other people won´t bite and my question surely can´t be entirely stupid. Still, I feel nervous and goofy when I am sneaking up to some ´silverbacks´ over coffee break to introduce myself and my heart is pounding out of my chest when I ask a question at the end of a talk. However, I have never regretted opening my mouth. So, here´s my advice to all starting PhD students, or even postdocs, that are afraid of asking questions or networking with strangers on conferences. Just do it. If you are planning to wait until you aren´t nervous about it, it will never happen, nervousness disappears with practice. Start with lab meetings, then try to ask a question during CIDD seminar. If you are worried that you might ask something stupid, or don´t know any question, use this trick: make yourself write up one or a few questions during every seminar. It will get your brain involved, and you´ll probably realize that often someone else is asking your question. Ask your question to other PhD students and postdocs afterwards to get your confidence up that you didn´t have a stupid question (which they never are!). Then one day, don´t think about it, raise your hand, and you´ll realize afterwards that the world still exists.

I truly think that actively participating in labmeetings, seminars and conferences will get you so much more than passively participating: not only will you learn more and generate new ideas, other people will get to know you and your thoughts too.

Well, so far my parting wisdom. Looking forward to seeing you all again (networking) at a future conference!

I like Marcel’s wisdom.

Three words. It’s that simple.

I’m writing this blog post because I’m stuck on the manuscript I’m working on. I’m attempting to address reviewer comments but many of the comments are open ended, which I’m struggling with because it requires my limiting reagent: good ideas.

When I bring this up to past and present advisors, I usually get a response along the line of “ideas are cheap.” That may be, but I still feel like what limits me is the number of good ideas I have in a given period of time. Worse, there is nothing that I can do speed up the rate at which I have good ideas. If I need to, I can power through a 12 hour day of lab work or sit down and type out several reasonable paragraphs on a given topic, but those things can only happen once I’ve had a good idea.

Sometimes talking to people helps back me out of a conceptual dead end, but I feel like I have to have something already formulated before talking to someone else. When I’m stuck with a collection of amorphous concepts that I need to synthesize in a novel way that pleases the reviewer, it’s hard to bring to another person.

So for now I’m going to go for a walk, I’m going to buy a cup of coffee, and I’m going to hope that I’m due for another good idea today.

Bonus link to a blog post on revising manuscripts: Chekhov’s Gun.