No More Behaving

I was having an interesting discussion the other day with a friend (over beers of course) about why we're in science.GrAdvisor is fond of saying, "Nobody gets into this field for the money."He's right, but he's also in a position where it's pretty easy to say that money doesn't matter. He's a well-established tenured PI who owns a very nice house and a very nice car and makes enough to continue living this rather comfortable lifestyle. Not to mention that his salary is secure.It's a different view from where my friend and I are at. We both really love doing science (or we wouldn't be here), but it's not so easy to be flippant about the pay. I'm starting to get kind of anxious about the next few years as a post-doc. It will certainly be a pay raise from my student stipend, but most or all of that increase will go towards paying off my (rather sizable) student loans. Our stipends here are under the estimated cost of living and I have no savings as a result. This doesn't keep me from wanting to continue in science, it just makes it pragmatically more difficult. I worry about how this is going to impact my future career (will I be able to afford to move to a new position? will I have the financial freedom to take a job that I like better over one that offers a higher salary?), and my life (like will I by able to buy a house before I'm 50? will I be able to save for retirement or will I have to work til I'm dead?), and just general stability (pre-tenure there's really not much in the way of job security - without any savings I can't afford a gap in employment).My friend just started a new post-doc. She's loving it. Her new PI is the polar opposite of the former one, and the difference in management styles and people skills has had a marked impact on her happiness in the lab and most importantly her motivation. We were talking about how some PIs subscribe to the idea of competitive motivation - let people compete within the lab and you will encourage better faster work by offering authorship to the one who gets the results first. I've seen this backfire. Sometimes it results in fraud. Sure, falsifying data is a decision that the individual makes and that individual should be held accountable, but it just doesn't make any sense to me to foster an environment where falsification might appear to be a valid option. PIs who employ this "competition" management technique seem to believe that they are incentivizing hard work. That might work for some people (probably those that "win" the race), but what about those who lose? Seems to me that if you pit three post-docs against one another in a race for data, you're establishing a gamesmanship dynamic. Personally, I'm not interested in playing under those conditions and I suspect I'm not alone.Other incentivizing techniques I've seen are less carrot and more stick. "If you don't get this paper/fellowship application/data set submitted by [arbitrary deadline] I won't let you attend conference/keep your job." Now, sometimes those are just the real life constraints and when that's the case them's the breaks, but I've also seen examples of people employing these kinds of threats just because they think it will make their trainees work harder.It's these sorts that make me want to beat them over their heads with a clue-by-four. Most of us are not here because we're offered awesome material rewards - if that's what we wanted we wouldn't be doing trained monkey tasks for peanuts. We're here in the lab because we're curious. We want to figure things out. We want to make a career of figuring things out, so we're willing to make material sacrifices now to give ourselves the best possible chance of letting that happen in the future. In short, we're intrinsically motivated. Which is why sticks don't work any better than a competition for carrots. Personally, I find it rather insulting if someone implies that I'm not working hard enough, and even more insulting if they believe that chasing me around will make me want to work harder. I'm not a donkey. I'm too smart to be happy being a pack animal. I like to work for and with people who get this and who appreciate that this is why I'm here. If those people want to throw me a carrot from time to time I certainly won't complain. But I'm doing this job for myself, my future, and my own curiosity, not for the peanuts, the cookies or the carrots, or to escape punishiment.I think that this video sums it all up rather nicely. Have a look - you won't be sorry.Dan Pink makes the point that the best way to motivate people who perform creative problem-solving tasks under poorly defined or unknown rules towards a non-specified outcome (gee, sound like experimentation at all?) is to foster autonomy, mastery of skills, and a sense of purpose. This is in stark contrast to what motivates people to perform well on mechanical (non-thinking) tasks with narrowly defined rules towards a "right answer" type of outcome. Carrots and sticks work rather well in those cases, but very little of what we do actually centers on these kinds of tasks. This is all backed up by robust empirical data. (Squeee! Data!) I think it's something that most of us "know" intrinsically, but when so much of our managerial experience (from either the manager's or the managee's position) relies on the carrot-and-stick model it's hard for people to break out of the pattern.It's also worth noting that relying on intrinsic motivators to inspire good work requires that the conventional extrinsic motivators (like pay) be "taken off the table". This does not mean that we shouldn't worry about paying people. It means that the people we're paying should adequately and fairly compensated for their work. If you are paid fairly and adequately then you're not spending your time worrying about making the rent or competing for the next big bonus, and you can focus that time and energy on (wait for it...) YOUR SCIENCE. Not only that, but once you're relieved of those pesky distractions like crap/unequal/unfair pay and inane competitions for worthless payoffs and pacifying the makers of obtuse demands or else!...you're more likely produce some really pretty good and innovative science.Revolutionary!

Labels: Motivation

...or lack thereof.Now that I got my antibody straightened out, I need to trouble-shoot my nuclear counterstain (which worked fine during the antibody trouble-shooting but now is not working at all). I don't really know where to begin with this since there's not much to that protocol except "apply at 1:1000 in PBS during the penultimate wash", which is what I've always done and it has always worked...until now.I can stain two slides in parallel - one from the old group and one from the new group. I expect I'll get stain on the one from the old group and not on the one from the new group, which will just be a replication of this weekend's unplanned experiment in counterstain efficacy. What will this really tell me? That I have 6 boxes of slides (new group) in which I have somehow completely stripped the sections of nucleic acids? (Is that even possible?)I'm not really superstitious, but lately it seems like everything I touch just turns to shit. I am the anti-Midas. I can't decide if it will be more effective to stay in bed until my mojo finds its way back or soldier through and meet my bad karma quota for the century so things can get back to normal again. I feel like handing in my "credible scientist" badge. Who the hell fucks up a nuclear counterstain? Seriously, never have I sucked so badly as I have for the last two weeks.

Labels: Motivation

I was just psyching myself to finish up the last of the dissertation...when my email popped up to say that the ManuBeast was rejected "declined" (PhysioProf tells me that this is not the same thing).Fuck.Some of the reviewers' critiques were pretty reasonable, and I now have data in hand to address most of them.However, the major catch-point for all of them was that they weren't convinced by one key piece of data: that a particular gene was *not* expressed in our tissue of interest. It's kind of important to our findings that this particular gene is not expressed, and I've gone to great lengths to show that it is not, complete with a very solid obvious convincing positive control. They still don't like it. Negative results are tough, but if we need to show that the gene is not expressed, then listen folks, you're going to have to be happy with a negative result. They don't seem to be unconvinced by the positive control, they just don't believe that this gene is not expressed because it makes sense that it would be. PEOPLE, LOOK AT THE FREAKIN' DATA PLEASE.The editor has "declined" our submission based on the reviewers' critiques but offered to let us resubmit if we think that we can address the reviewers' concerns. I do have other data to bolster the central finding of the paper (which is not actually about this gene, however the non-expression of this gene is important to our conclusions), but I was hoping to put some of it into a second paper. And there is no way to demonstrate that the gene is not expressed without showing that see, it's not there. Look at the positive control - there it is! Look at the experimental samples - not there! Since this is the major sticking point, I'm not sure that I can be any more convincing about this. LOOK AT THE DATA!! I know everyone expects it to be expressed there. I did too when I started this project. BUT IT ISN'T!!! (And that's why it's interesting.) See?!?!? You can see it right here!!What worries me is that even if we go to another journal, this field is small enough that we're likely to get the same reviewers. As I said, most of their suggestions are reasonable, but if they're going to be irrationally hung up on this gene that is not expressed, then I don't know what else I can do to show them that it is NOT EXPRESSED.Grrrrr.Will try to put this out of my head so I can finish Chapter 3 and get the dissertation submitted in the next couple of days. This is really hard to do right now.

Labels: Motivation