Life / Science - is it an "either or" proposition?

Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others… there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

- Bertrand Russell

There is a pervasive belief in science that unless you’re an obsessive workaholic you can’t be successful — there is overwork for some and scientific starvation for the rest.

Further, there is a glorification of the singleminded pursuit of scientific goals. The scientific model is far removed from the idea of renaissance man – science is frequently reduced to a game with points awarded for papers and citations.

What bothers me is that these obsessives are not content to obsess in private. We have to constantly reaffirm their antisocial tendencies and lionize this overworking ideal- we have to feel lazy because we don’t come in on the weekend, because we take our holidays, because we have a life outside the lab.

I have a revolutionary thought. What if science is not best done by obsessed workaholics with no concern for their lives outside the lab?

A sketch of this antisocial ideal is presented to us in this week’s Nature – a report of the Quiñones-Hinojosa lab does little except describe the dire working conditions.

In 2007, just two years after he started at Hopkins, he rounded a corner in the cafeteria and saw his lab members sitting at a table, talking and laughing. When they caught sight of him, he says, they stopped, stood up, and went straight back to the lab.

So does the Nature article or the accompanying editorial challenge this idea?

Anyone lacking the inner intellectual drive and a capacity for relentless focus to get to the heart of the way the world works should stay away.

This is not a repudiation of this anti-social approach to science – it’s a weak, dog whistling endorsement.

Consider some of the output of the lab described in Nature – according to the article, the 27-person ‘wet’ lab has published 29 papers in the last 5 years. The dry lab has produced the bulk of papers. A quick check of the first 20 Quiñones-Hinojosa papers yields these papers:

• “Glandular intoxication” following emergent tracheotomy during transsphenoidal surgery for acromegaly: Cushing’s 1910 unrecognized case of thyroid storm?
• Harvey Cushing’s case series of trigeminal neuralgia at the Johns Hopkins Hospital: a surgeon’s quest to advance the treatment of the ‘suicide disease’.
• Unique challenges faced by pediatric neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing in 1909 at Johns Hopkins: a choroid plexus tumor of the lateral ventricle mimicking a cerebellar lesion.
• Harvey Cushing’s surgical treatment of a pediatric patient with an intraventricular glioma.
• The understanding and operative treatment of cerebral palsy at the turn of the twentieth century: Harvey
• Cushing’s early forays into pediatric neurosurgery.
• Harvey Cushing and pediatric brain tumors at Johns Hopkins: the early stages of development.
• Dr. Harvey Cushing’s attempts to cure migraine based on theories of pathophysiology.
• Harvey Cushing’s repair of a dural defect after a traumatic brain injury: novel use of a fat graft.
• Harvey Cushing: early use of tendon transfers for repair of foot deformity.
• Operative treatment for microcephaly secondary to craniosynostosis at the turn of the twentieth century.
• Harvey Cushing’s Operative Treatment of Metastatic Breast Cancer to the Central Nervous System in the Early 1900s.

This is 11 out of the first 20 papers on Pubmed. Call me cynical, but couldn’t Harvey Cushing have published this stuff if he had thought it worth it? Is this the future of science – have we lowered the bar so much on what is worthy of publication that we can now go back through forgotten work by great scientists and pick scraps off their lab benches and publish them? When I was in Japan observing the Japanese at tourist hotspots, I noticed that people took a lot of photos and with the advent of digital cameras, they are taking more and more and more photos. Not a revolutionary observation, but I wondered – how did they have time to actually look at all these photos they were taking? If things followed the natural progression would a trigger-happy Japanese tourist eventually spend all their time taking, and have very little time for viewing their photos? I think the physical photographs – the output – were incidental. It is the process of taking photos – the grouping together, the communal nature of deeming a place worthy of being photographed, that is important. Is this what has happened with science? Are we obsessed with process and the output – the scientific discovery – has become as irrelevant as all those unviewed photographs?

I think the scientist who works weekends and has lab meetings until 10pm on Friday nights should be shunned. Generations of people have fought for decent working conditions – an eight hour work day was a triumph of collective action. No-one was arguing that you couldn’t achieve more by working 16 hours a day down a mine. They were arguing that there is more to life than work.

So what’s changed? The bosses have been replaced with an overbearing incentive structure that rewards hours in the lab and mindless churn over considered thought. Just because the exploitative boss has been replaced with a system which rewards self-exploitation and the exploitation of your juniors doesn’t make it right and certainly doesn’t make it an ideal to aspire to. In 1856 the stonemasons of Melbourne stood together and demanded decent working conditions so they could have a fair life-work balance. It’s time scientists did the same.

I haven’t quit science – consider me on strike.

by pete