The curse of soft money….

UCSF’s Henry Bourne has an interesting piece out in PNAS about the boom/bust cycle in biomedical research and specifically how the most recent version played out with vast over-building of infrastructure combined with a shift to soft-money support for PI’s. The documentation of the problems is very impressive, however the notion that this can be fixed piecemeal at a few “pioneer” research institutions I think is dead wrong. To my mind, such elitism is exactly how we arrived at our current situation. And in fact, I’m pleased to report that it’s actually at non-elite institutions where the hard money regime still exists, supported by tuition and, in the case of publics, some state support.

Do I have a solution? Here’s a possibility: I urge my biomedical colleagues to take a hard look at the decadal surveys of other fields (e.g. astronomy or oceanography) where hard prioritization choices are made nationally on the basis of evidence.

Another White House science appointment…

Princeton emeritus professor Will Happer, more here.

I’ll simply note his views on climate are at variance with the global scientific consensus. His question about whether increases in CO2 result in the carbon sink of plant life on the planet is interesting.  Since the Carbon Cycle is coupled in various complex ways to plant growth (e.g. through the Nitrogen Cycle), I’d say the answer is not obvious.

The latest from NEON

NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network, is a major research instrumentation asset that the NSF has built for scientists investigating how the environment and ecosystems interact at a continental scale. Here is the latestIMG_1104.jpg from Observatory Director and Chief Scientist, Sharon Collinge. It’s really good to see that this project is coming to a successful fruition.

There’s no photo credit on the image because it’s my photo. I took it at the NEON tower at Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts. Among many data products being produced, one of the most exciting are carbon flux measurements using the eddy-flux methodology. These are important because they provide a window into an ecosystem as it essentially breathes, just like we do. And that has enormous implications for climate change.

The location of this particular NEON tower (one of many across the United States) is particularly interesting because there is also a very long time series (25 years or so) of such measurements produced by the Ameriflux Network. If NEON can take advantage of such older measurements in a way that calibrates rigorously between the two systems, the power of continental scale (3-dimensions) will be enriched by a fourth dimension, time.

Rose hip neurons specific to humans…

Putative inhibitory neurons located in layer I of cortex. They make up between 10 and 15% inhibitory cells in that most superficial layer. Story here, courtesy of SCIENCE.

What is interesting is that these cells are not found in mouse brain as determined by single nucleus RNAseq. Which raises the question about whether these cells are important to human-level higher cognition.

Link to the original paper in Nature Neuroscience here.

 

International science: at risk?

According to SCIENCE magazine, the NIH is taking a serious look at US funded research products (including ideas, data and intellectual property) leaking to other nations–particularly near-peer competitors such as China. This is not happening in a political vacuum: the current trade tensions between the US Administration and China come to mind. And there have been concerns from Congress even before the 2016 election.

I don’t doubt that there have been instances of bad behavior by individual scientists, particularly those with dual allegiances. But I also passionately believe that the really tough scientific questions require an intellectual approach–look at Higgs in particle physics or the various brain research initiatives. Big science requires a big tent.

I hope we don’t throw the baby out with the bath water here.

The Role of Single PI Science….

I often get the question, especially when speaking to biologists, about whether there is still a role for the single principal investigator (PI) style of hypothesis-based research that was mainly the norm for the life sciences in the last century. My parents’ neuroscience lab at Cal Tech was certainly emblematic of that approach in the 1970’s.  In such research groups, a single senior person was the PI for a grant (or grants). There were well-defined hypotheses for each research project executed by a junior person and generally cross-laboratory collaborations were rare.

I’ve written about team science, fairly recently. And the advent of Internet-enabled open collaboration technologies such as Jupyter Notebooksalong with large-scale major research facilities that produce open data are certainly driving a trend. But I do think there is still a critical role for the small-scale single PI approach.

Why? First, from the standpoint of training new scientists, junior folks tend to get more intense mentorship is such groups. At least for some trainees, that’s clearly desirable. Second, there is a lot to be said for the classic Popperian experimental design. With a falsifiable hypothesis and with proper statistical analysis, I think it’s less susceptible to p-hacking. Finally, I would argue that massive scientific teams might tend to be more conservative, missing out on truly transformative research findings that might arise in the laboratory of a courageous single-PI.

And the new semester begins….

I am back from a week of vacation in California. My native state is as beautiful as ever. However, on the plane flight back to DC, we flew directly over Yosemite where the smoke from the wildfires was clearly visible and concentrated in the Valley. It’s a reminder of how powerful nature can be and how it’s not a given that it’ll be aligned with human concerns. The image below is from my visit to Yosemite last summer. There were fires then also.

This coming week, the new semester begins. I’m looking forward….IMG_1165

 

 

 

 

A bit about my new gig….

The summer break here at George Mason is coming to an end, classes begin in about two weeks and I thought it would good to write a bit about my new life as a plain old professor here at the Schar School. When I left NSF in January, I had negotiated my return to the University to reflect the public policy experience involved in running the Biological Sciences Directorate. Additionally, it had become clear to me that after 23 years in one administrative role after another, I wanted a change in the direction of more time to teach and do research. So when it was approved that my faculty line would be moved from the Krasnow Institute to the Schar School here in Arlington I was really jazzed. There was the additional benefit that the commuting distance would be halved.

I did start though with some trepidation. I had effectively been out of academia for more than three years—that in spite of NSF’s program for supporting rotator to stay involved with research at their home institution. That might work at the Program Director level at NSF, but it’s really not practical when you are responsible for an entire directorate. As a result, I was very rusty from the standpoint of both teaching and research—the two things I would be expected to do as a professor. Hence, it was a real confidence builder to get a grant in the first weeks that I was back and to actually jump back into teaching (rather than worrying about it).

 

I find that these past months have been some of the most satisfying of my life from a professional standpoint. The sheer pleasure of quiet time to think about science rather than have to instantly react to some crisis is something not to be underestimated. And I have found that my interests extend across a much wider landscape than before I left Mason for NSF. My current grant is on AI. The next one will probably be on metagenomics. Who knows what will come next!

Douthat on the Humanities and Small Liberal Arts Colleges…

Today’s Douthat Column in the NYT is excellent. My readers may know that I attended Amherst College (mentioned in the column) during the 1970’s and can attest to the popularity of the humanities there, at that time. He points out the statistics that show the trend towards the other of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. Indeed, when I was at Amherst, I very much wanted to major in political science. It was my parents who pushed me to major in chemistry.

But….it strikes me that Douthat, in despair at the moral crisis of the West, is really just urging us to return, metaphorically, to the modern version of monastery retreats, as the Irish monks did during the Dark Ages when they purportedly saved western cultural tradition.

I don’t think that this will do. Climate Change will not wait for a future Renaissance to arrive. Neither will the thousands of nuclear warheads that sit on alert. It is vital that science and engineering thrive for the future of the planet and the humanities.