The need for speed
| 7 June, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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Guest post by Morgan Giddings
I lead dual lives.
In one of them, decisions are made slowly and deliberately, if at all. Processes and procedures never change without great debate and discussion. Being in a hurry is not a favorable attribute. In fact, being in a hurry leads to a lot of pushback, because someone will feel that their voice was not heard properly in an extended debate.
In the other, a lack of speed can kill. Snap decisions have to be made. Opportunities are jumped upon before fifty other people jump on them. There’s no thinking about five years from now, since it is impossible to predict; planning six months away is about as far as it goes. Every day there’s a new challenge and a new opportunity. Those who dawdle are left in the dust.
You may have already guessed what these two lives are. The first is my life as a professor in an academic institution, and the other is as an entrepreneur who owns two small businesses. I’m not going to argue that one of these models is superior to the other from a theoretical perspective. They both have strengths and weaknesses. But I am going to argue that one of these models is not practical given the realities of the modern world.
We live on internet time now. Things happen quickly in the real world. Conditions change.
Let’s consider this: three years ago, had you even heard of Facebook or Twitter? If you’re like most people, you hadn’t. Yet now you may even be involved in one or both of them. These developments represent a dramatically new and different trend in how human knowledge can be and is going to be shared.
Just yesterday, I ran across a site where people can share audio clips, and then others can listen and annotate. A bit like YouTube but for sounds. You might think, “that’s cute,” like I did. But then I saw people were using it to share new ways of composing music. This leads to an accelerated evolution of ideas that was not previously possible.
How many academic departments do you know use YouTube, Facebook or Twitter to disseminate or promote the evolution of human knowledge? Yet it is happening, whether we academics participate in it or not. The trend is passing us by, and leading to a future where we could become irrelevant.
What does this have to do with speed? Picture this: a young faculty member joins a biochemistry department, and focusses on disseminating the results of her experiments via YouTube. Thousands of people watch the videos, and her discoveries are noticed far and wide. But, since she has now “published” her ideas and experiments, most journals won’t take her papers. Besides, she has much more impact on video, so wants to spend her time doing that. What will happen when she comes up for tenure? In most of the departments I know she’d be thrown out on her butt – despite having a huge impact with her science.
Now perhaps I’m jaded, but, if I were to go through the tenure process again, I would not risk my career on an unknown like this. I would do exactly what I did to get tenure: put my nose to the grindstone to publish in traditional venues, get grants, and teach. I might supplement with new stuff, but I would not count on it for my tenure.
I was on a committee last year to reexamine tenure requirements in light of the changes in publishing technology. There was a lot of talk about “giving credit” for new kinds of effort like this. There were even new guidelines penned. Despite this, I don’t honestly believe that most tenure review committees will move away from longstanding traditions. A more progressive minority if faculty members might want to give credit for non traditional methods, but based upon the debates I’ve seen in my department the anti-change elements would win out.
This is where the need for speed comes in. If Universities fail to keep up with the startling pace of change in how knowledge is disseminated and advanced, they will become increasingly irrelevant. That’s a bad thing – especially for universities that depend on public goodwill for financial support.
I don’t know how to solve this on a system-wide, structural level. It is a very big problem, because the current way that universities operate is based on deeply embedded centuries-old cultural values. The conflict between those values and the internet-enabled world will lead to gut wrenching changes over the next few decades (unless society as a whole decides to take a breather on the pace of change, which seems unlikely).
However, individually, there’s a lot that one can do to keep up. It requires a bit of an entrepreneurial mindset, but I’d argue that’s necessary to make it in science anyway.
If you already agree with me, then there’s no reason to wait. For example, you could post regularly to YouTube about your published work. And, if you don’t like the concept of “marketing” your work like this, ask yourself this: would you rather have more or less people read your paper?
Most of all, you can stay relevant – whether or not your institution does. As an individual, you have the power to be speedy and entrepreneurial, ignoring the slowness of your institution and anti-change bureaucracy. You can use new ways of disseminating your knowledge as a supplement to the old ways. It can only benefit your career to do so.
Or, you can sit around and let change leave you behind.
Morgan Giddings is writing a book on concepts like this, titled
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thank you for blogging about what bothers the heck out of me re academics after having spent many years in biotech: the slowness of the academy process boggles my mind and frustrates me immensely and i sometimes feel like my own efforts are becoming mired down and my brain moving from jet speed to idle. between that, and the lack of project management skills i so often see demonstrated, it is a wonder that anything gets done at all. the culture of academics and the culture of entrepreneurship, though, really cannot be compared. the concern is whether we are training a new generation of researchers to think outside the bounds of the academy to recognize that there are ways to communicate and there are ways to communicate effectively
Thank you for the feedback! I can understand your frustration – I face it daily. “Speed” is addictive. Going back and forth from the speedy entrepreneurial activities I do to the academe is a constant culture/system shock for me.
I agree with you about the communication – that’s why I started writing a book on the subject, and am getting close to completing it. I suspect that it won’t be the last thing I’ll produce on the subject – young scientists need a great deal of enlightenment in this regard.
Cool! Can you give us a link to the audio sharing site? Thanks!
Here’s an example of the music sharing widgets in action, in a quite amusing way (i.e. turn any song into a swing song):
http://musicmachinery.com/2010/05/21/the-swinger/
The site isn’t loading for me at the moment, but if you can get it to load, it is worth a look.
Oh, and the actual sound sharing site is:
http://soundcloud.com/
I think the situation is worse than you portray, Morgan. Our entire scientific system is based on the philosophy that time does not matter. It is better to test hypotheses one molecule at a time and be absolutely certain of the result than to make actual progress on diseases. We have convinced the taxpayers that if we just are allowed to do “good science” all will be well in the end. Unfortunately, the taxpayers and their representatives in Congress are beginning to question this assumption. Billions have been spent on cancer, and we really are little advanced over where we were 40 years ago. Oh, we have new therapies that have fewer side effects, but they still do not cure cancer. For the most part, your surgeon cures your cancer or you die.
The reason so little progress has been made is we do what we can design with the perfect approach, not what needs to be done. Reviewers have been trained to eliminate any proposal that lacks this perfect design as a “fishing expedition.” Therefore a proposal that carefully outlines a study over 5 years that will tell how molecule A regulates molecule B will win out every time over a really good idea about how metastasis works and maybe how it can be prevented. Do not believe for one moment that “Significance” really means anything in scoring.
A recent article in Newsweek, an earlier one in Fortune and the generally stagnant NIH budgets show the taxpayers are getting wise. The vast majority of our work just fills dusty library shelves and doesn’t really attack the fundamental problems of human disease. Private industry is little better, and all do essentially what everyone else is doing. We do what we can, not what needs to be done because doing well what can be done wins out over doing what needs doing. I think the future of science is not bright unless the system changes, but changing direction of a hide-bound juggernaut like academic science is impossible.
Hi Bob,
I agree that the main problem is this view that “time doesn’t matter.”
I also agree that taxpayers are getting wise. Partly, I believe that’s a natural side effect of the budget woes that all governments are now experiencing after years of profligate spending on just about everything. I believe that during the next decade there are going to be a lot of pressures on all activities supported by governments to scale back. Science included. The problem is, science doesn’t do a very good job of marketing. And in mentioning “marketing,” I need to make it clear that great marketing begins with a great product (i.e. results, such as a cancer cure!). We do have some significant results from science that can be “marketed” to the public – just think about the human genome project. But it is true that there are not as many results as have been promised.
But I don’t take as pessimistic a view as you about study sections. I think that people want to do the right thing, but that the vast majority of proposals most of us write just aren’t very good. And so things get muddled, and it gets hard to tell the good from the bad, the useful from the non-useful. It is a lot easier to understand the “benefit” of a research program that says: “I’m going to study how molecule A regulates molecule B” than it is to understand the benefit of saying: “I’m going to do some proteomics to compare these two tissue types.” While the latter *may* have more benefit in the long run, at the time of grant review, that benefit is vague and ill-defined. Going back to my point that people are inherently conservative (and hence don’t like to gamble), it is clear which one they’ll pick, almost every time.
As you know, I teach a solution to that in my online grant writing course: give conservative reviewers what they want, and figure out how to fit what you want to do within “what they want”. (Let me make it clear – there is no subterfuge here, rather, it is simply making sure that your project is structured in the most palatable way). It is quite possible to do – to seem conservative while at the same time having some little “add ons” that aren’t so conservative. But it requires a different way of approaching the grant writing process that most people do.
It is my own belief that those of us who are entrepreneurial, productive, and learn to do “marketing” for themselves and their work will do pretty well. Those of us who don’t do these things are going to really struggle as budgets shrink and taxpayers continue to ask for more accountability.
The big question I have is whether the universities with their slow culture and rampant bureaucracy will get out of the way to let the fast movers thrive. If they don’t, I think they’re going to slowly bleed themselves to death.
When I get cancer, which therapy should I go with: the one published in a stuffy old-fashioned peer reviewed journal, or the one I came across on YouTube?
While “peer review” does filter the blatant quacks out, it doesn’t do much more than that. It is not a system for vetting “what works.” How many times have you heard of a reviewer repeating the experiments in the paper they are reviewing in order to determine whether the paper’s claims are true or not (all before publication)? It is very rare (and it never happens with large clinical trials).
In fact, all the real-world testing by peers happens *after the paper has been published*. Given time and sufficient exposure for the paper, eventually someone is going to try to repeat the results, and find out whether or not it “works”. But that process has little to do with the peer review.
I’m not an advocate of tearing down the peer review system. But at the same time, we need to be realistic about what it can accomplish, and when it comes to vetting which cancer therapies work versus those which don’t work, peer review is useless.
Consider this. Say I come up with a “cancer cure” tomorrow, and I post it on Youtube. The very same day, you can watch that video and start exploring its validity (at least in cell culture – human trials are a different ballgame). Say that my “cure” kills off your cancer cell cultures, and so it does show promise. Next week, you can post a Youtube video about your results. Another researcher sees that video, and says, “maybe they have something”. That researcher takes the “cure” immediately into an animal model, and starts testing the “cure”. She finds out right away that it appears to be doing something, and reports back on Youtube within a month. Other researchers start asking for more details, and repeating the experiments themselves. It snowballs into a clinical trial that’s being carried out within under a year from the original experiment. If there had been something like that, my father would likely still be alive.
Now imagine that same scenario in the present “peer review” system. First of all, my paper would be rejected out of hand. 80% of reviewers would say, “no, that doesn’t work” out of hand – simply because it is something new and different (nearly all people are conservative within their disciplines – I have a youtube video about that).
If I am persistent and lucky (and a very good marketer for my work), I’ll eventually get it published – perhaps a few years later.
Then you do your cell culture experiments. And then you go through the same “peer review” process to publish your results. We’ve just added on two more years.
Then the animal model person adds on another few years.
So we’ve just lost six years or more, and likely any enthusiasm and momentum that there was for this discovery is now squashed. Yes, enthusiasm is important! Without it, nothing happens.
You tell me, which of those two scenarios is more likely to yourcure more quickly?
Honestly people need to stop worrying about tenure committees. If you do good work and you are active in the community, you will be able to sell yourself. I really doubt that people will not see your portfolio as valuable just because it’s not in a “traditional” form.
My plan is to go with the open science approach and do everything on the web, like you advocate. I’m just entering grad school, so I think I have enough time for attitudes to change. If they don’t by that time, it’s really academia’s loss.