I love the Science Times. If it weren't for the newsprint that gets all over my fingers and adds to the general feeling of disgustingness I have when I arrive at work I would pick it up every Tuesday on my way to the subway.
Instead I try to read it online, and today I'm glad that I did. This article discussing what happens when grad students go crazy and kill their professors highlights the uncomfortable experience of being beholden to your advisor and having your success, and at times entire happiness, wrapped up in his or her approval.
And advisers aren't always the most humble or encouraging of individuals. One faculty member I knew in grad school would force his students to prepare posters for national meetings and departmental retreats on nights and weekends and then would randomly pull their presentations from the agenda with little or no explanation.
The sad part? He was a really nice guy to the grad students who weren't in his lab; we had no idea what a jerk he was until one of our classmates joined his lab.
The really sad part? He was given tenure and continues to oppress and mistreat his lab members to this day.
If the tenure system rewards people like that, why would someone who's decent and treats his or her students well ever want to be a faculty member? Search me! But luckily I worked with one.
My advisor was a relatively new faculty member when I joined her lab in the last millennium. She got to know her lab members, invited us to her house for parties and took us out for lunches to celebrate successful paper and grant submissions.
But she's definitely in the minority, though for the life of me I can't understand why. Much as I was troubled by the reports of violence against PhD advisers in the Times article today, after viewing life in other labs at my graduate school and others, I think the tenure system provides no incentive to treat graduate students any better.
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Monday, January 08, 2007
Stem cells... Get Yer Stem Cells!
In a surprising paper announced for publication in Nature Biotechnology this week, scientists at Wake Forest School of Medicine (Go Deacs!) and Harvard School of Medicine claim to have purified human embryonic stem cells from amniotic fluid. (See report in Scientific American at: Science & Technology at Scientific American.com)
Why, you may wonder (if you wonder about such things at all), is this discovery any more important or any less controversial than previously documented methods of isolating stem cells from human embryos? There are a few reasons:
1. Amniocenteses are an extremely common procedure generally used in mothers over 35 to diagnose chromosomal abnormalities such as trisomy 21 (Downs Syndrome) and other gross chromosomal abnormalities. The procedure uses a long needle to extract amniotic fluid (the fluid surrounding a fetus) and does carry some risks to the pregnancy, but is nonetheless a common procedure.
2. The stem cells which authors estimate make up 1% of all cells in amniotic fluid do not appear to be required for embryonic development; these cells have been sloughed off or otherwise discharged from the embryo and float around in the amniotic fluid. This may prove to be a critical difference for individuals who believe that the current practice of generating human stem cells, removing them from the inner cell mass of early stage embryos, is tantamount to murder. The presence of stem cells in the amniotic fluid means that they are not being removed from the actual embryo, perhaps sidestepping certain religious and ethical objections.
Are these stem cells as good as the ones that have been previously isolated? So far it appears that these stem cells have the ability to differentiate into the three main tissue types: ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm from which all organs and tissues are made. The challenge, should this source of stem cells be proven to be as reliable as the inner cell mass, is to understand the growth factors and signals these cells require to differentiate into adult tissue types.
Perhaps such a benign source of embryonic stem cells is just what the field needs to escape the political rhetoric that currently circumscribes its research.
Why, you may wonder (if you wonder about such things at all), is this discovery any more important or any less controversial than previously documented methods of isolating stem cells from human embryos? There are a few reasons:
1. Amniocenteses are an extremely common procedure generally used in mothers over 35 to diagnose chromosomal abnormalities such as trisomy 21 (Downs Syndrome) and other gross chromosomal abnormalities. The procedure uses a long needle to extract amniotic fluid (the fluid surrounding a fetus) and does carry some risks to the pregnancy, but is nonetheless a common procedure.
2. The stem cells which authors estimate make up 1% of all cells in amniotic fluid do not appear to be required for embryonic development; these cells have been sloughed off or otherwise discharged from the embryo and float around in the amniotic fluid. This may prove to be a critical difference for individuals who believe that the current practice of generating human stem cells, removing them from the inner cell mass of early stage embryos, is tantamount to murder. The presence of stem cells in the amniotic fluid means that they are not being removed from the actual embryo, perhaps sidestepping certain religious and ethical objections.
Are these stem cells as good as the ones that have been previously isolated? So far it appears that these stem cells have the ability to differentiate into the three main tissue types: ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm from which all organs and tissues are made. The challenge, should this source of stem cells be proven to be as reliable as the inner cell mass, is to understand the growth factors and signals these cells require to differentiate into adult tissue types.
Perhaps such a benign source of embryonic stem cells is just what the field needs to escape the political rhetoric that currently circumscribes its research.
Friday, December 01, 2006
Fix That Data!
Ironically, in the same issue of Science magazine where editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy summarized actions taken by Science to improve its editorial process in the wake of the Korean Human Cloning Scandal, a new scandal has been reported. This time scientists in a Missouri lab allegedly falsified data published in the February 17th issue of Science where they claimed that key cell fate decisions made in the early mouse embryo occur at the very first cell division.
Mah, you may say, so what? So plenty! The determination of anterior-posterior polarity in the embryo is, frankly, what keeps your head out of your ass. Those individuals who choose to realign their body plans later... well that's a personal choice.
The key observation in the February 17th paper was that one of the cells produced in the first cell division of a fertilized mouse egg expresses higher levels of the Cdx2 transcription factor (a class of protein that controls the expression of other proteins) than the other. This initial difference could help explain why certain cells in the mouse embryo are better for generating clones than others.
And now? Not so much. It turns out that the observation that Cdx2 is higher in one mouse cell than the other is fairly easy to fake using Photoshop, or Correl Draw or any of the other common tools embryologists use to prepare their microscopic images for publication. This is not only unrepresentative of the actual data but also tantamount to lying about the results.
Falsification of data is wrong. It's also pretty dumb since the first thing that competing labs do once a paper is published is to try to replicate the results. If they can't get the experiment to work, and they're a hot shot lab themselves, the fraud will be uncovered pretty quickly.
But even if uncovered expeditiously, the cost of fraud is great: in the time of the reviewers, the time of the journal editors, the time of the scientists both perpetrating the fraud and uncovering the fraud. And when you're an academic researcher, the tax payers are footing the bill for all of that time.
So who bears the responsibility for scientific misconduct, as the policy wonks are calling it? With the exception of Woo Suk Hwang's very public denouncement by the global scientific community, it's generally not the lab head, or as they are called on grants, the Principle Investigator (PI). Generally, the blame falls on lower level scientists, often postdoctoral fellows (PhD scientists in an apprenticeship position with the PI) or in some cases the graduate student pursuing a PhD with the PI.
These lower level scientists often carry out the experimentation and are in direct contact with the data. However, a laboratory is led by the PI and there should be some accountability by the management of the lab for transgressions that happen within it. The PI's name is on the grants and is generally the last author on the peer-reviewed publications, and thus should be held accountable.
So why is this not a common practice?
It's no secret that PI's are given little, if any guidance on how to run a lab. Most are thrust from their positions as postdoctoral fellows directly into positions as a lab heads. They receive little mentoring, and no management training as if running a lab were as instinctive as flying south for the winter. Some inroads have been made to this problem, such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Guide to Scientific Management and the UC Davis Laboratory Management Institute but management training should become a more mainstream part of scientists career development. (If you think that ANY career development would be an improvement over what they've got now, I'm with ya!)
Perhaps with better management practices in place, including frequent meetings and structured oversight of lower level scientists, misconduct would be less easily hidden from the PI's. And perhaps fewer PI's would suffer from the anterior-posterior realignment to which I referred earlier.
Mah, you may say, so what? So plenty! The determination of anterior-posterior polarity in the embryo is, frankly, what keeps your head out of your ass. Those individuals who choose to realign their body plans later... well that's a personal choice.
The key observation in the February 17th paper was that one of the cells produced in the first cell division of a fertilized mouse egg expresses higher levels of the Cdx2 transcription factor (a class of protein that controls the expression of other proteins) than the other. This initial difference could help explain why certain cells in the mouse embryo are better for generating clones than others.
And now? Not so much. It turns out that the observation that Cdx2 is higher in one mouse cell than the other is fairly easy to fake using Photoshop, or Correl Draw or any of the other common tools embryologists use to prepare their microscopic images for publication. This is not only unrepresentative of the actual data but also tantamount to lying about the results.
Falsification of data is wrong. It's also pretty dumb since the first thing that competing labs do once a paper is published is to try to replicate the results. If they can't get the experiment to work, and they're a hot shot lab themselves, the fraud will be uncovered pretty quickly.
But even if uncovered expeditiously, the cost of fraud is great: in the time of the reviewers, the time of the journal editors, the time of the scientists both perpetrating the fraud and uncovering the fraud. And when you're an academic researcher, the tax payers are footing the bill for all of that time.
So who bears the responsibility for scientific misconduct, as the policy wonks are calling it? With the exception of Woo Suk Hwang's very public denouncement by the global scientific community, it's generally not the lab head, or as they are called on grants, the Principle Investigator (PI). Generally, the blame falls on lower level scientists, often postdoctoral fellows (PhD scientists in an apprenticeship position with the PI) or in some cases the graduate student pursuing a PhD with the PI.
These lower level scientists often carry out the experimentation and are in direct contact with the data. However, a laboratory is led by the PI and there should be some accountability by the management of the lab for transgressions that happen within it. The PI's name is on the grants and is generally the last author on the peer-reviewed publications, and thus should be held accountable.
So why is this not a common practice?
It's no secret that PI's are given little, if any guidance on how to run a lab. Most are thrust from their positions as postdoctoral fellows directly into positions as a lab heads. They receive little mentoring, and no management training as if running a lab were as instinctive as flying south for the winter. Some inroads have been made to this problem, such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Guide to Scientific Management and the UC Davis Laboratory Management Institute but management training should become a more mainstream part of scientists career development. (If you think that ANY career development would be an improvement over what they've got now, I'm with ya!)
Perhaps with better management practices in place, including frequent meetings and structured oversight of lower level scientists, misconduct would be less easily hidden from the PI's. And perhaps fewer PI's would suffer from the anterior-posterior realignment to which I referred earlier.
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