
How Life Sciences Actually Work - DarkContinent
https://guzey.com/how-life-sciences-actually-work/
======
an_d_rew
Being a life-sciences refugee myself, I read this essay and noted that my
intellectual response to it was very discordant with my emotional response to
it.

Intellectually, I think the author did a very good job and although like any
scientist I could nitpick, grossly speaking I found myself agreeing.

Emotionally, however… Having been through the wringer I would ask any reader
to consider not just the “central tendencies” viewpoint but the “this is YOU
going through this” viewpoint.

If you are doggedly determined and personally consumed with getting into a
fantastic lab to bootstrap your career so that you can slave away for
essentially minimum wage with no benefits so that you could get a research
position for which you might get a job security at the age of 42 to 45…
Seriously?!

For many, that prospect looks very different when you’re closer to twenty than
fifty.

Here’s another view point: the system is horribly horribly broken, leaving a
trail of collateral human damage… But there are so many people throwing
themselves at the meat grinder that inevitably greatness occasionally arises.

Do I sound bitter and cynical? Perhaps. But living the experience, for me and
many many others, is rather different than reading summaries of what the life
is like.

~~~
guzey
Thank you for this. I completely agree with you. Unfortunately my essay had a
different focus but maybe I should try to interview people just on their
personal feelings and see how that -- less cerebral -- perspective would be
different...

~~~
nextos
While I like your article a lot, as I said in another comment, I disagree
about some conclusions.

In my opinion, big groups are the cancer of life sciences academia. It's not
just me who thinks that. If you look into all the organizational research that
HHMI did prior to setting up Janelia Labs, they essentially concluded that
CSHL, LMB and Bell Labs were so successful in the past because groups were
small and all funding was internal (which implies you no longer need PIs, you
can go back to classical professors).

The vast majority of the big PIs I have worked or interacted with (and that
includes Cambridge, Oxford, EMBL, Karolinska, MIT and other places) are pure
_rent seekers_ , literally. They bet on some postdocs or PhDs and simply stamp
their name as last authors if there is a publication. However, they rarely
have any insights on what is being done. Sometimes they don't even understand
it at all. So no value added, just profit. Unless you count as value chairing
conference calls, calling editors to negotiate publication terms or discussing
funding with agencies (most grants are actually written by senior postdocs,
despite what author lists indicate).

That's when things go well. When personal issues pop up, they can screw up
their subordinates big time. I have witnessed this many times. After all,
grads and postdocs are just pawns in their chessboard.

Such an organization is at odds with classical academia, where your professor
(not PI) was your mentor and you would engage into endless discussions about
science with him. Other fields retain some of this approach, but in life
sciences it is lost.

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Dumblydorr
One issue I ran into personally is incremental vs fundamental research. In the
drive to get publications, which provides evidence of production so you can
get grants, better jobs, more money, better publications in higher journals--
the quest for all that leads to very small steps in research. There are
proportionally far fewer biologists than there used to be working on
fundamental, big picture type work. One counterpoint may be that the low
hanging fruit has been picked. However, I feel it's also a cultural problem.
To do well, so many of us biologists get caught in the incrementalism loop
rather than thinking bigger.

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guzey
Author here - this essay is the result of a year (and 100+ interviews) of my
figuring out how life sciences work. (there are also discussions of it on
reddit [1] and on twitter [2])

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/cqxcey/how_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/cqxcey/how_life_sciences_actually_work_findings_of_a/)
(16 comments)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/alexeyguzey/status/1162017187919478784](https://twitter.com/alexeyguzey/status/1162017187919478784)
(28 responses)

~~~
ArtWomb
Terrific stuff. I'd be interested in hearing your opinion about where
additional funds would come from. And the areas most in need of allocation.
Life sciences research can be a black hole. Infinite funds and data in, with
very little usable output. At least that tends to be the perception ;)

An additional trend I've noticed is that many senior researchers tend to veer
away from the pure research and discovery that marked early triumphs. And veer
into issues of cruft, turf wars, plumbing, and "technical debt" later in their
careers. A kind of "low hanging fruit" mentality sets in. In ML research for
example, issues of reproducibility and generalizability need to be solved
before trust can be placed in the system. And while I recognize the ethical
need for theoretical foundations to be rock solid before deployment at scale.
I am wondering if that's the class of problems the most brilliant minds should
be working on.

It's only now that we are getting hard metrics about the return on research
expenditures. And while its currently in vogue for administrators to use these
stats competitively and make claims like "UCL published more Neuroscience
papers than MIT last year". We should start to see more wise allocations of
research dollars into the areas of development most needed.

Thanks!

~~~
guzey
As I wrote in [https://guzey.com/patronage-and-research-
labs/](https://guzey.com/patronage-and-research-labs/) \- my hope is that
philanthropists and foundations will be deciding to experiment more and to
allow scientists to pursue research differently...

Wouldn't want to point to specific areas - rather I think that we need to find
brilliant people and back whatever they're working on.

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jkh1
One additional point is needed to complete the picture. Life sciences research
is now almost completely dependent on technologies and reagents provided by a
small number of commercial entities. Building custom equipment or synthesizing
reagents has become almost impossible because institutions have gotten rid of
their science support facilities and staff.

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ThomPete
Aren't you kind of mixing engineering with science?

We still have plenty of opportunity for optimization of scientific discoveries
in biology, what we don't have plenty of is new scientific discoveries.

I am just asking, maybe I am missing something but read like that to me.

~~~
guzey
There's plenty of space of new scientific discoveries in biology! Wikipedia
for example has a good list:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_biology)

~~~
ThomPete
Sure there is space but thats not the point though :)

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iso1337
I'd recommend the following book:

How Economics Shapes Science [https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Shapes-Science-
Paula-Stepha...](https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Shapes-Science-Paula-
Stephan/dp/0674088166)

It looks into key challenges of the scientific labor market.

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DrAwdeOccarim
Great read. If you ever want to do this for industry life science research,
I'd love to participate!

