Category Archives: Scientific Musings

It’s a great thing to be ignorant and lazy..

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I was asked to give the Commencement Speech at the Graduate School ceremony. That’s about 2,000 students getting advanced degrees plus their families. It’s an odd thing to be asked to do. The invitation letter read: “I am confident our graduates and guests would have significant interest in your own life story and the experiences, factors, or personal characteristics that have most contributed to your considerable achievements.”

I was less confident, not least about the ‘considerable achievements’, but I was reminded recently that I am not doing enough to push myself out of my comfort zone, so I said yes. It turned out to be more challenging than writing a scientific paper and less challenging than a TED talk.

Below, the text of what emerged from my ruminations. You can watch it here (start at 34 min 21s).

“Thank you President Barron for your introduction. Congratulations to the graduating graduates for your achievements. Now you are really stepping out on life’s journey.

I on the other hand realized rather suddenly that I am no longer setting out. Continue reading →

Undoing

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michael-lewis-the-undoing-projectI just finished reading The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. He’s the guy who wrote Moneyball and The Big Short, riveting books about the arcane subjects of choosing baseball players and the subprime crash of 2008. This latest book is even better. The Undoing Project is one of the best science books I have ever read. It has fascinating science as well as love, obsession, envy, triumph, failure, self-doubt, arrogance, humility and war. It’ll make a fantastic movie and might do more than even The Double Helix to explain to non-scientists how science gets done — and how it is such a human endeavor.

Ultimately the book is about the triumphs (and failings) of two scientists, Danny Kanneman and Amos Taversky, and their studies of human failings. Much wisdom emanates from them. One Taversky line particularly resonated, I guess because my frantic semester finally ended, it’s the Christmas break and sabbatical is beckoning:

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.

I think there is something to that. My best, most creative thinking happened when I was on sabbatical or research leave, or in the early years at Penn State before fund-raising, teaching and institutional nonsense caught up. The Undoing Project is really about identifying important problems. Hyper-busyness gets in the way. New Year’s resolution: Just say no.

p-hacking and science with an agenda

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I recently read this post about p-hacking (see also: data dredging, fishing, snooping). Two things that I found to be noteworthy were an interactive example of how p-hacking works, and a description of an experiment where different research teams analyzed the same data set:

 

“Twenty-nine teams with a total of 61 analysts took part. The researchers used a wide variety of methods, ranging — for those of you interested in the methodological gore — from simple linear regression techniques to complex multilevel regressions and Bayesian approaches. They also made different decisions about which secondary variables to use in their analyses.

 

Despite analyzing the same data, the researchers got a variety of results. Twenty teams concluded that soccer referees gave more red cards to dark-skinned players, and nine teams found no significant relationship between skin color and red cards.”

 

To reiterate, all of the methods used were justifiable. There wasn’t any fudging or fabricating data. A group of skilled analysts sat down and came up with 29 defensible methods for analyzing the same data that gave different answers. To me, this is the stuff of existential crises. To quote the article, “[e]very result is a temporary truth”. Which I think is pretty concerning if you’re working in a situation where temporary truths don’t cut it.

 

Joshua Tewksbury is a biologist who spent 10 years as a professor at the University of Washington before moving to a position with the World Wildlife Fund. About a year ago, he wrote a post about transitioning to an NGO position where, he writes, “[s]cience shows up as just another wrench in the toolkit.” A deeply malleable tool, apparently. On the one hand, it’s troubling to think about making decisions with temporary truths. On the other hand, and this strikes me as almost heretical to type, if you deeply believe in your cause, maybe it’s not so bad to (ethically and with full disclosure) make subjective decisions in how you analyze your data to advance your cause.

 

After thinking about it for a while, I’m still not sure how bad my crisis should be. In the first post, one of the project leaders is quoted as saying:

 

“On the one hand, our study shows that results are heavily reliant on analytic choices,” Uhlmann told me. “On the other hand, it also suggests there’s a there there. It’s hard to look at that data and say there’s no bias against dark-skinned players.”

 

At first pass, this didn’t help me. As somebody who takes comfort in certainty (and don’t most scientists?) the “squint at it” method of assessing data is an endless source of frustration. But I’ve also realized that we might feel confident about one other thing from the soccer data set. No groups concluded that lighter skinned players received more red cards. Maybe there are some relatively permanent truths, it’s just that they don’t answer the question we set out to answer.

JFK

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Prompted by an excellent album by Public Service Broadcasting, I have been pondering a speech JFK gave on, coincidentally, the very day I was born. It was the speech that persuaded America to get into the Space Race (“We choose go to the moon in this decade, and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard“). I’ve always admired how America rose to his challenge. That was the decade when Americans were sufficiently proud of American science and its potential to invest in it properly. Or sufficiently scared of the science of others.

But another part of the speech has me thinking.

“…we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds”.

Half a century later, nothing has changed. Maybe it never will.

Pylon appreciation

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People are “into” lots of things, but lots of things people are “into” I had no idea were even things. I finally got around to reading a book I’ve had on my reading list for a long time: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton. Chapter VII is on transmission engineering and introduces a founding member of the Pylon Appreciation Society (“Ian”). I didn’t even know what pylon was, so obviously I had no appreciation for what pylon-appreciators must be appreciating.

Pylons are those big metal things that hold our electricity cables. When you stand under them you can hear a crackling sound which is called “corona discharge” (the sound of nitrogen and oxygen splitting). The distance between pylons is a very interesting science: longer cables, vibrate more, the more they vibrate the weaker they become and the more pressure they put on the pylon. The reason we don’t see the cables shaking violently even with massive amounts of electricity vibrating through, is because of weighted tubes that have springs which vibrate at an opposing frequency to the conductor. So that’s what the coily things do that are attached to pylons.

Something I found particularly interesting was the naming scheme for cables that are different widths. Widths vary depending on how much electricity they need to carry, and this determines how many strands of aluminum cable are twisted together. The names for cables of different thicknesses are named after flowers that have stems with similar looking cross-sections. The smallest type of electric cable is called poppy because it has one strand of aluminum surrounded by six strands that go around the circumference. As you go up in size there is the laurel, the hyacinth, the marigold, the bluebonnet and the cowslip. 7,19,37,61,91,127.

The number pattern got me side-tracked because I couldn’t figure out how you would predict the next number in the sequence, de Botton didn’t seem to find this interesting because he didn’t mention anything about why cables and flowers should be like that.

The pattern is this: each number in the sequence is predicted by 1+6(1/2 n (n-1)). When you google this that means the numbers are called hex numbers or centered hexagonal numbers. You can also predict the next number in the sequence by taking the difference between consecutive cubes.

In our field we use hexagonal numbers to get the area estimates for ring vaccination. Maybe we should start calling our ring vaccinated areas after flower names. Large vaccine rings can be bluebonnets and we can call the smaller ones “Poppy vaccination campaigns”?

 

Desert Island Books.

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For domestic reasons, I have been recently reunited with my book collection. There is a fantastic BBC radio series (70+ years old now) where celebrities talk about the 8 songs/tracks/music pieces they would take to a Desert Island. Music is tough. But much to my surprise, re-studying my ‘library’, my list of eight books is easy. In no particular order:

Failure Is Not An Option. A testament to what humans can achieve freed from Health and Safety, HR and the corporate bullshit of ‘Your safety is our top priority’. Management everywhere need to read this. The best of the Apollo books, by far. As my colleague Marcel Salathe is fond of saying, quoting I think one of the Roosevelts: When safety comes first, America is lost. These guys had higher ambitions, and they walked in the heavens. Americans, read this: it is what you are capable of.

A Bright Shining Lie. I see I first read this a quarter century ago. It is still with me. Searing.

The Donkeys. The folly of man. Even more powerful since Sean and I, and later son Matthew and I, went to the battlefields, this book in hand. The ‘hills’ are slight rises. The mud is awful. The inanity of the carnage unimaginable.

Lindberg. An amazing man, described by an amazing biographer. A biographer who never discovered the extra families his subject raised.

Into the Silence. “They had seen so much of death that life mattered less than the moments of being alive.” A ballsy lesson for us all: exploration of the world, of ourselves, trumps everything.

The Idea Factory. The ambition of these guys. Let’s bounce a telephone signal from California to New York off an earth-orbit satellite the size of a basket ball… if only someone could figure a way to put a satellite in earth orbit (it was the 1940s). Before that – before that – they had the math of cell phones sorted. Humanity has lost so much ambition.

Steve Jobs. I suppose there are people on the planet who have not read this book. For me, it induced calm. It is ok to imagine that computers should be better, easier to use. I look forward to the day. Meantime, important lesson: one should suffer ass-holes, just in case they’re the one.

Lovelock. The dilemma of the Berlin moment. Better to achieve perfection, just once in a life after years of planning? Or to aspire and never make it? Or to never be in the running?

Nanosponges

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I recently saw a popular science article on using nanosponges to manage infections. These sponges circulate in the body and absorb pore-forming toxins (PFTs) which are a major virulence mechanism. Although still in the early stages, the technology has been shown to improve the survival rate of mice injected with the toxin staphylococcal alpha-haemolysin.

This article got me thinking outside of the traditional “drug centred” paradigm of disease management. In particular, wondering about the evolutionary ramifications of a nanosponge (or similar) approach and also how such technologies might be exceedingly beneficial for individuals with limited drug options (like the biofilm scenario we discussed in TBD). A link to the original Nature article is here.

 

 

Bold (and unfounded) statements

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I just read these first two opening lines of a 2014 paper by Tokponnon et al.

“The widespread use of insecticide-treated nets (LLINs) leads to the development of vector resistance to insecticide. This resistance can reduce the effectiveness of LLIN-based interventions and perhaps reverse progress in reducing malaria morbidity.”

I first read this as: “Using insecticide treated nets reduces their effectiveness which could increase malaria”. A somewhat misleading start to a paper that concluded that there was actually decreased malaria prevalence in areas with high mosquito insecticide resistance.

I doubt that pyrethroid resistance is mainly caused by using insecticide treated bed nets. Typically the main suspect for increasing resistance is either large scale spraying of pyrethroids often for agricultural purposes, and this is particularly true in Benin where this study took place.

Is it possible that the number of bed nets deployed could make enough of a dent on mosquito populations to be the main selective driver for resistance? It’s worth debating, but this paper didn’t show that resistance was a problem. In fact, either because of local environmental differences of even behavioral differences (like biting at different times of day for example when people aren’t under nets) they found more susceptible mosquito populations were actually transmitting more malaria parasites even with the same LLIN coverage and use. Should we worry about insecticide resistance? Maybe, but I think more studies like this one would be very useful to judge how much we should worry.

What is resistance?

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And more to the point, how does it differ from natural variation in susceptibility within a population?

(image from this Nature news piece in 2011).

In the insecticide resistance literature, the World Health Organization defines a population of mosquitoes as resistant to an insecticide if fewer than 80% of them are killed by a one-hour exposure to a given concentration of a chemical.  It’s not a great definition, but at least it is bounded by time and numbers. The WHO categorizes resistance as four types: 1) increased metabolism to non-toxic products 2) decreased target site sensitivity 3) decreased rates of insecticide penetration (thought to be insignificant unless in combination with other mechanisms) 4) increased rates of insecticide excretion (considered uncommon and producing low resistance).

The same WHO document states: “Resistance mechanisms do not necessarily operate throughout all life stages” referring to insecticide resistance testing in mosquitoes. This struck me as similar to malaria where drugs don’t necessarily work on all possible targets (liver stages vs. blood stages for example).

This is just starting fodder for a TBD meeting discussion. Resistance seems poorly defined in many areas of disease prevention and treatment, even when we are looking for it. How does one determine that resistance is a problem? For mosquito control, not all mosquitoes in a population might have resistance to a particular insecticide, and not all “resistant” mosquitoes will survive a dose of chemical, it might depend on how much of it they contact. I’ll be thinking about antibiotics, malaria drugs, and other topics with “resistance” issues – add your two cents here to get a conversation going.

Chinese Whispers & Dr Stewart

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It is customary for infectious disease biologists to open their talks with a quote ascribed to Dr Wiliam H Stewart, who served as Surgeon General of the United States between 1965-69, ‘It is time to close the book on infectious diseases, the war on pestilence is over’. Beginning in this way gives members of the audience, particularly those that study emerging infectious diseases or evolution, the chance to smile knowingly at each other as if to say ‘Ha! How wrong they were!’. Having united the audience in smuggery, the speaker moves on, safe in the knowledge that they’ve established themselves as one of the tribe.

Dr William H Stewart

I decided to open my own bid for membership of this tribe, my thesis proposal, with this quote. To Google, I went. The quote was found, sure, but not a reliable source for it. Then I fell on a letter to Clinical Infectious Diseases by Dr Brad Spellberg. He too had gone after the quote and, after five long years of trying, had found no evidence that Dr Stewart had ever uttered it. Neither had the US Public Health Service.  I wasn’t terribly surprised. I often find myself chasing merry go rounds of citations.  ‘Author 1’ cites ‘Author 2’ who cited ‘Author 3’, who seems to have decided one morning to state that malaria parasites require a certain nutrient for growth, for example, without performing an appropriate experiment to demonstrate that this is so. Somehow the scientific community picks Author 1’s article as a favorite and it is cited as evidence of the nutrient’s importance, thereafter.

Being in the business of constant questioning, it seems obvious that we should ensure that a cited work actually demonstrates what it is claimed to, if only to prevent us from building ideas on shaky foundations. And, in this verity-pursuing spirit, I would like to join Dr Spellberg in calling for the use of other (confirmed) quotes to illustrate the point that it was once misguidedly believed that the ‘war’ on disease was over. Of the quotes that Spellberg found, I’m backing the use of a statement by Dr Robert Petersdorf, which nicely illustrates the point and might also get a laugh: ‘I cannot conceive of the need for…more [graduating trainees in] infectious diseases…unless they spend their time culturing each other’.

Why don’t cats, dogs, and horses get malaria?

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Lots of animals get malaria, including birds, reptiles, snakes, primates, bats, rodents, and at least one ungulate, the antelope. Even turtles get Haemoproteus parasites, a phylogenetic sister species to those in the Plasmodium malaria parasite group. So why don’t cats, dogs, and horses get malaria? There are also no documented cases in pigs that I could find, and with a questionable exception of a case in a water buffalo, bovids may also be exempt.

I started looking for similarities among animals that haven’t had malaria.

One of the most important organs for humans and rodents in fighting malaria parasite infection is the spleen. In a bold statement, one researcher suggests that the evolution of spleen structure may have been driven by malaria parasite infections. Primates and rodents have a defensive type spleen. Looking for differences among spleen morphologies seemed like a logical place to start.

I found that canids and equids have in common “storage type” spleens, called dynamic sequestering spleens where they store blood and have drastic changes in hematocrit with exercise. Cats also have this type of spleen that works as a dynamic sequestering organ for blood. How much blood is being stored? Horses store up to half of their RBCs in the spleen, and dogs store 1/3, changing hematocrit drastically when going from resting to exercise. Cats may store 20% of their RBCs in their spleen. In contrast, our hematocrits change maybe 5% with exercise, and no more than 2-3% of this change is due to the spleen, the rest is from water moving to our muscles.

So, is it a coincidence that animals that have dynamic sequestering spleen are malaria-free? Correlation isn’t causation, and since horses, dogs, and cats share a closer phylogenetic history than the rest, it is difficult to sort out whether lack of malaria parasite infection is because of spleen morphology or other shared features.

The spleen isn’t a commonly discussed organ (there’s even a paper called “The avian spleen, a neglected organ” by J.L. John in 1994, which states that bird spleens don’t store red blood cells). However, the spleen removes parasitized red blood cells, is involved in making new RBCs, has immune functions, and plays a large role in malaria clearance. So, is it spleen evolution or morphology the reason horses, cats, and dogs don’t get malaria? And could it be that rapidly shifting hematocrits stop these parasites?

How to change science

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I have just finished reading The Silwood Circle. It’s by an historian of science with a big interest in the philosophy of science. Despite that, I could hardly put it down. I found it riveting partly because I know the players involved, and partly because it is about putting math into ecology (and why that matters even though the models are largely heuristic). But mostly I could not put it down because the book is really about a bunch of men (all men), who set out to insert ecology into the heart of British science and The Establishment – and why they succeeded. I think it has lessons for young folk who want to change science – and older folk who want the next generation to change science.

Silwood Park is a campus of Imperial College London. In the late 1960s, Richard Southwood and slightly later Bob May set out to use Silwood to transform ecology, particularly British ecology. By the time I came on the scene in the mid to late 1980s, they had done it. It was achieved by picking the right people (smart, ambitious, sociable) and opening doors (career opportunities, prizes) once those people performed (which the anointed ones did). But more importantly, it seems, it was done by putting together people who shared a common philosophy about how to do science but whose interests and specific expertise were complementary within the group. They drove each other forward (as big egos do), but as part of an us-against-them mentality, not a dog-eat-dog approach. And my sense is they laughed and argued and socialized as a group, something which really glued them together. Together, they rode the 1970’s environmentalism into the upper reaches of the British establishment. Much of it because they hiked together. It might all hinge on the hiking.

I have heard the criticism that the book fails to acknowledge what happened elsewhere in the world at that same time. That is perhaps a little fair. I also wonder if the Southwood ambition and associated narrative look a bit clearer in retrospect. But to me, what is really missing from the book is an analysis of the impact of charisma. Several of the protagonists are (or were) some of the most charming, forceful, articulate, erudite, stylish, visionary, self-confident, stimulating people I have ever met in science. Add to that potent mix their ability to unite previously disparate subjects like pesticides, parasitoids, parasites, predators, pathogens, public health, plants and a whole lot of other p-words like parties and pubs, and well, ka-Pow.

It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it

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I’ve been taught science writing should be terse and pithy. In that spirit, here is a distillation of this post: Does pressure to be both concise and persuasive drive the development of biased terminology in science?

I started thinking about this a little bit last week when the term “evolutionary rescue” came up as an aside during Dave’s talk about genetic diversity and the rate of evolution. The basic idea with evolutionary rescue is if a population experiencing rapid environmental change has a lot of genetic diversity, then some individuals can adapt rapidly to the new conditions and “rescue” the population, preventing extinction (dependent on population size and the magnitude of change).  I have become so used to thinking about evolution in a framework of parasites and drug resistance where the parasites are the bad guys that it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that in this case the drug resistant parasites would be the heroes that would “rescue” a declining parasite population under drug pressure.

There is a lot of jargon in science, some of which is certainly useful specific shorthand, and certainly some that adds unnecessary complexity, confusion, and arguably bias. I think part of this is storytelling, which I agree is an art and part of what makes science sticky and accessible to non-scientists. I attended a great lecture last year called “Making Tricky Science into Sticky Stories” and was convinced. Then again, is calling a single-celled organism “devious” (even if it’s a parasite) when it is just doing what every other life form on Earth is doing – living and reproducing – really necessary? Terms like evolutionary rescue give a positive connotation to rapid adaptation in changing conditions, and perhaps not surprisingly is used in the climate change literature where this is a pleasing and hopeful concept, but this concept is so closely tied to other rapid adaptations, such as in parasites for drug resistance, that it might be better just to spell out what we mean instead of making up a new term.

Making use of our human bias

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Terrifying perfection, at least in the petri dish.

The name Dd2 may not mean much to you, but to me it is the Mary Poppins of malaria strains. Dd2 is multi-drug resistant, and research shows it grows faster than many other strains because it invades red blood cells better and makes more offspring per red blood cell–it’s practically perfect in every way.

I worry about sharing that with people, because it is strong evidence that I anthropomorphize the organisms I study, but after reading this article, I suspect that attaching images and impressions to words is a fundamental part of human language processing. The mental images we attach to words and phrases are suggestive of the way we think about the world. For example, when someone says they had a rough day, apparently many of us go to a sandpaper place in our minds. But what I find encouraging about all of this is that we each bring a different set of biases to the table. For the phrase “flying pig” some of us think of a pig with wings but others imagine a Superman-like pig flying through the air. Scientists worry about a lot about systematic biases–like basing our knowledge of the brain on right-handed people only–but if this article is right, many of our more subtle biases might not be systematic. Since all of us carry different biases, then if we got enough people from different backgrounds and cultures together, we could make use of our unsystematic biases to do better science. Perhaps it’s not a problem that I think of Dd2 as Mary Poppins, so long as other people favor a different metaphor.

You had me at “Dear Dr. Mideo”

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I find reviewing a paper to be sort of a strange experience with an unclear payoff. On the one hand, even when I feel like I’ve been negligent in keeping up with new literature, if I’m reviewing papers then I’m still learning about the latest (and most relevant) research.

On the other hand:
1. I take way too long to review papers — the whole process probably takes 10 hours when you sum it all up, though that’s spread over a few days. I like to read the paper, think about it, read it again, write about it, sleep on it, read it again, rewrite about it, submit. That’s a lot of time away from doing my own research, and a lot of time that I realise I won’t have the luxury of spending on every single paper in the near future.

2. I often think I’ve done a bad job. Usually I have about 38 minutes of grace after submitting a review before the feeling that I wrote something completely stupid and beside the point starts to sink in. I hate this feeling. Very very occasionally I don’t think I’ve done a bad job, like that one time when Referee #2 offered only one sentence, with no punctuation, that was in absolutely no way helpful. That time my review was awesome (at least by comparison).

On balance, it’s not clear that the time and anxiety involved is worth it, especially considering that we’re all guilty of complaining — often with considerable venom — about the reviewers of our own papers. It’s a pretty thankless task. Until it isn’t. 

It’s funny how little a journal has to do to make us feel valued. You’re welcome, Proc R Soc. Any time. Glad I could help.

Scientific Hurdles

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I tried jumping a couple of hurdles when I ran track in high school. Literally, like two, and fortunately they were set up on grass.  Let’s just say my physical coordination has never been all that awesome, and it’s a good thing I became a scientist.

Research has its own hurdles, and lately they have been mainly logistical as I have been setting up our facility for culturing Plasmodium falciparum. We’ve been keeping parasites alive since February 24th. Hurdles have included: no gas or vacuum lines hooked up to the biosafety cabinets (solution: portable vacuum pumps and portable refillable fuel containers for flame); no ultrapure water for making media (solution: carboys and the occasional trip to main campus); a brand new liquid nitrogen tank that was a true lemon, bubbling away 47 liters of liquid nitrogen in less than 48 hours (solution: we should be getting a replacement tank soon, but in the meantime we’re using some extra space in another tank to store a few samples).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Retrofitting of our incubator with CO2 capacity still has a few electrical bugs to work out, and getting someone to fix these has taken a while. This would have delayed culturing, so rather than wait, we bought a candle jar. It’s a big glass desiccation container with a candle lit inside – when the candle snuffs, the gas is perfect for parasites, though the more permanent fix for the electrical mystery surrounding the sensor is in the works.

Similar to my high school experience of first trying hurdles on the softer grass, I’m lucky to have good bosses, and good support from my lab mates to make this thing work. Simon in particular has been jumping many of these hurdles with me. The first infected feed using our home-grown parasites was yesterday. The finish line of getting an infected mossie is getting closer!

Feeding mossies Plasmodium falciparum for the first time! Mosquitoes are in the cups, which are then placed in secondary containers after the feed is over.

As a side note – I learned a few things today on a tour of the new BSL3 facility that is currently under construction. Piping in gas is an issue for fire safety, and vacuum lines using BSL3 agents need special filtration systems before the air can go outside; this probably explains why these weren’t already in our biosafety cabinets.

Life as an Ectotherm

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I don’t have time to write a full post now, but I wanted to mention that my roommate and I once played around with the idea of starting a blog entitled “Life as an Ectotherm” and writing entries about how our lives would be different if we were ectotherms.
In case you all are out of blogging ideas.

Science = Discovery + Synthesis?

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“I see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost forever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them—and at the risk of making fools of ourselves.”

— Erwin Schrödinger

Andrew and I are currently battling to write a Primer for PLoS Biology. Primers are short, informal pieces that put a forthcoming paper into context. (In our case, it’s a difficult to penetrate forthcoming paper, which is a Herculean mix of simple and complex mathematical models, in vitro ecological experiments, and whole genome sequencing.) When he asked me about writing this piece with him, Andrew pointed out “You don’t need more papers like this on your cv”.

He’s right. My cv is a near even split of original research and reviews / opinions. Looking at just my first author publications, original research accounts for only 40% of them.

Over the course of applying for fellowships and jobs, I’ve worried about this. A reviewer of my failed NERC fellowship application stated that he’d like to see my “big picture thinking rebalanced into more original outputs”. It’s worth noting here, though, that these comments didn’t keep me from being interviewed and aren’t the reason that I didn’t get the fellowship. Indeed, during the interview I wasn’t even asked about this aspect of my publication record. Shame, since I had prepared a nice justification of it: science is about both discovery and synthesis. What good are a bunch of independent discoveries if no one weaves them together into a bigger picture?

But careers in science aren’t generally built on being enthusiastic about other people’s research over doing one’s own. At least, I don’t think they are. (Are they?!) So, this is something that I still worry I will have to defend at some point in the future.

The only discovery I seem to be making is that I don’t really have a flair for discovery. Hopefully I’ll have a flair for picking students who do.