Good mentoring offers a rebuke to the cynicism of the Red Queens.

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place” says the Red Queen to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the looking-glass. That notion, of running like mad just to stay in the same place, has since inspired a number of scientific theories including why species must continually evolve in order to resist extinction, and the role of sexual reproduction in the arms race between hosts and parasites. But nowadays it applies just as well to the careers of individual group leaders. 

Publish a paper. Write a grant off the back of it. Publish another paper. Write another grant off the back of that. Again, and again, and again, because otherwise, the group runs out of money and ceases to exist. You’re only as good as your last paper. You’re only going as long as you have grants. Running and running and exhausting yourself, and yet for all that frenzied activity there’s the impression that you’re staying still or, worse, struggling not to slip backwards. The Red Queen’s motion might meet the biochemical definition of a steady state, but to anyone inside that maelstrom it’s anything but calm.

The Red Queen, in this context, defines a very cynical academic philosophy that frames the fundamental goals of research as being papers and grants rather than doing good science. To the idealist, papers and grants should be the by-products of doing good science, but not the aim in itself. The Red Queen is therefore another manifestation of Goodhart’s law in which the metrics have become the targets, rather than being a readout on scientific performance. 

In theory, doing good science should go hand-in-hand with good mentoring. Do good science, with young scientists as the main drivers in the lab, and they will therefore be well-mentored and emerge as good scientists in their own right. 

But if the goal of research becomes the metric (papers and grants) rather than good science, then good mentoring will also take second place. Papers and especially grants benefit the group leader much more than student and postdocs, so if the group leader’s needs are being prioritised, and a Red Queen mentality is dominant, then good mentoring will be more hit-and-miss. Push it to the limits, and the Red Queens will end up red in tooth and claw too – if the obsession is on keeping position on the treadmill, then students and postdocs will become casualties of that need. 

And for what? What, at the end of the day, does this relentless churn produce for individual group leaders? Citations for papers tail off, usually quite quickly, and impact can never be reliably predicted; grants are of finite duration. Because of the attritional nature of contemporary peer review (and the level of aggression frequently encountered), successes in both papers and grants are nowadays likely to be met not with celebration, but a sense of exhausted relief. The pleasure is always fleeting. There are many, many reasons why research can feel like an unfulfilling and futile occupation when you depend on these external sources for validation.

But a commitment to proper mentoring changes that equation. 

Train a young scientist well and you create somebody who can produce output for 10, 20 years or more. It’s like the old Lao Tzu quote about giving a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. 

In a similar vein, Acemoglu & Robinson’s book “Why nations fail” highlighted the differing trajectories of inclusive versus extractive institutions, with inclusive groups incentivising people for further success and thereby breeding greater prosperity, while extractive groups use people for short-term gain and benefit only one person or a small number of people at the top. 

Use a young scientist extractively to make a paper and that one paper is all they’ll ever produce and you’ll never hear from them again; mentor a student to become a proper scientist and they’ll repay that investment many times over, whether in research papers or other outputs, and they’ll credit you for their success.

That’s a key point. If a young scientist feels they weren’t mentored well, then any success they later achieve they will see as being despite the start they had; if they feel they were mentored well, then they’ll see any success they later achieve as being because of the training they received.

To see the success this represents requires an adjustment of perspective, a move away from the Red Queens’ lens. You need to be able to take a vicarious pleasure in the achievements of people who passed through your lab, because their later success is unlikely to benefit you directly. You might, sometimes, need to be able to acknowledge that they have become better or more successful than you are. But the indirect yields from this viewpoint are enormous. 

Prioritising good mentoring allows an escape from the Sisyphean labours of the Red Queens’, because it introduces something that moves forward in time instead of remaining in one place. The group may remain in foment, churning on and on with more publications and grants (because even the most enlightened mentors still need to publish papers and win funding), but the group’s former students and postdocs will radiate outwards like so many comet trails. Seen this way, it’s not a futile cycle at all, but an engine of creation. This is a beautiful thing.