A look back at a rather rocky 7th year of operations – 2022 was the year that seemed to race by in a matter of hours, but which also felt as though it aged me five years.
Continue reading2022: TIR’s year in review
Short sight & Oversight (the ballad of Marc Tessier-Lavigne)
The Stanford president’s uncomfortable shortcomings in terms of research integrity will come as no surprise to those familiar with the dynamics of scientific career progression.
Continue readingGreat scientists, great moustaches VI (a Movember posting)
Are you a moustache fan? To conclude Movember 2022, here’s our annual celebration of some great minds and the great moustaches that went (just) before them. Links to instalments I-V can be found at the end for real moustache aficionados.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Movember Foundation is a charity focused on men’s health issues – prostate cancer, testicular cancer, suicide prevention, and mental health in particular. “Mo Bros” grow moustaches – sometimes dashing, sometimes daft – for the 30 days of November in order to help raise awareness of these issues. It’s fun, and it’s important.
Continue readingPraise, censure, and the dream of open science
Highlighting good-quality work post-publication might be more feasible and of more value than attempting to police data integrity.
It’s the dream of open science: people post their work online, the community reviews it and provides constructive feedback, and then the authors correct their findings based on that feedback. Any new knowledge produced is rapidly and expertly assessed by the community as a whole, thereby maximising the input that the authors receive as they continue to pursue their lines of enquiry. Everyone participates, everyone benefits.
It sounds great, right? The problem is that almost nobody in the community voluntarily reviews others’ work. We’re all too busy. Peer review is a community service that does not have the cold hard reputational currency of grants and publications, and while appreciated, it is nonetheless undervalued in career terms. Preprints have belatedly and wonderfully achieved mainstream recognition in the biological sciences, but the majority of chatter for the majority of preprints is publicity-based. The comments area of most preprints is empty, with only around 8% of accruing public input.
Continue readingA letter to a friend
Dear Ruth,
I’m very sorry that you were unhappy about the recent postings on the blog and the generally negative tone that has characterised a lot of the recent material. I’m also very sorry if you, as a fellow group leader, felt that you were being accused of exploiting the students in your care.
Continue readingThe 9 types of Horror Lab
A special Hallowe’en posting. Horror movies and PhD/postdoc projects sometimes unfortunately have a lot in common, with naive and idealistic young things being gobbled up by a gallery of nasties. But what exactly are the 9 types of horror lab?
Continue readingStockholm syndrome
The iron law of scientific oligarchies
The scientific community has entrenched oligarchies. Science would be better served if they were broken up.
Continue readingAutism in academia – an interview with Dr. Mariana De Niz
Hitting the target (a short guide to validating antibody specificity)
Antibodies are essential and ubiquitous tools in biology, but their unguarded usage can easily lead to error. Here’s how to validate their specificity, and ensure that they’re hitting the right target.
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Total Internal Reflection 