Will That Be Trash or Credit? | Hacker News Reader

Will That Be Trash or Credit?

sciencecareers.sciencemag.org

88 pointsjawns46 comments

One of the linked stories is much more interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/science/notebooks-shed-lig...

Apparently Selman Waksman's 1952 Nobel in medicine is fraudulent, and it was his grad student who made the discovery (isolation of the antibiotic streptomycin -- first treatment for tuberculosis). He falsely claimed to have done it himself and slandered his student to discredit him.

Here is Schatz's side of the story, which based on my readings about the case seems entirely true (and thus motivated my username selection): http://www.albertschatzphd.com/?cat=articles&subcat=stre...

So what did they do about the Nobel prize awarded to Waksman?

I can see why people like Grigory Perelman have an anti-awards stance: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/07/02/mathematician-rejects....

I don't have these trust issues with my professor over my research project... we understand that we will post to ArXiv when the research is done. I think you should try to pick not just good research projects but also good people.

I started off knowing this professor by going to his office hours. I would ask questions and he would answer. As I got to know him I realize that he was very nice.

Paranoia is a part of research though. You have to realize that what you are working on you don't really want to get scooped though. You do want to keep your research projects "secret" until they are done. This means until you have figured out whats unique you shouldn't post to arxiv. But, you are free to tell others.

Due to the fact that we hear about events like this in news sources it shows that plagarism and issues of who gets credit are relatively rare. For the most part science does give credit where its due.

That doesn't mean it could be better. There is a stark disconnect between grad students and professors. Why don't we value grad students more anyways? Aren't they creating the future? Shouldn't they make at least $30k? I guess we just want them to live a bohemian lifestyle until they graduate. Or they must have rich parents to support them until they are self sufficient.

One of the things that struck me while I was reading the article (besides the subliminal implication that go-getter graduate students all read Science!) is that while I new of all the discoveries mentioned, I didn't know any of the discoverers. I use MRI, but I know the company that makes the machines and the software, not which obscure dude in some corner of the world first published the technique.

This is something that is common to all human existence. Enjoy your work and your own accomplishments. Don't worry too much about the adulation from others, especially strangers. It is fleeting, quickly forgotten, and there is that six month rule about adapting to whatever new level of fame/wealth you attain, so that you keep wanting more.

PS. Another point, PhDs in the UK and Germany often take 3 years. It's only in the US that the concept of keeping graduate students on leash for more that six years has been honed to an art.

"PhDs in the UK and Germany often take 3 years"

Certainly can be done - usual outline I remember from the UK group I worked in was:

- 6 months to do background reading in area and decide on a thesis topic

- 2 years to do the research

- 6 months to write up

I knew some people who did this, although most of us were salaried researchers (RAs) who had "day jobs" that aligned to varying degree with our research topic. I saw people taking from 3 to 7 years - the former tending to be research students and the latter RAs who were working on topics not terribly close to what their day job was paying them to do.

From what I can tell, UK first degrees tend (at least historically) to be much more focused than US ones - which is good if you are happy with the focus and disastrous if you aren't - this carries onto research degrees, which AFAIK don't usually have any taught component.

[NB I bailed after 6 years as an RA to co-found a startup - I was heartily sick of academia by this point]

> Don't worry too much about the adulation from others, especially strangers. It is fleeting, quickly forgotten, and there is that six month rule about adapting to whatever new level of fame/wealth you attain, so that you keep wanting more.

Is this true with the "publish or be forgotten" ethos of academia?

Being able to point to a list of published research papers seems to be a useful thing for a resumé - and having the juicy ones sniped by colleagues is going to hurt.

3 years is supposed to be the aim but most in the UK will still take 4 or 5. I've seen many a PhD student forced to experiment right up to the end of year 3 and been told to not start writing up until the start of 4. At which point they are banned from the lab and then given minimal support to complete in a decent timeframe.

I believe that in the UK students have a master's degree before starting a PhD program (whereas in the US they usually don't), so it isn't quite comparable.

Some do and some don't. It used to be that you needed a 1st class degree in the subject from a good university to be taken straight in. With 2(1) or not a top uni, you would be 'encouraged' to do masters first, which worked as an additional filter.

It seems now you can go directly from a BS into a PhD program - in the past you had to have a master degree first before you were allowed into PhD programs.

Still many programs in the UK require you to have a post-grad / master degree before accepting you into their PhD programs, but you can often start research during your master and expand your master thesis into the PhD (depending on the subject).

In the UK most non-teaching/non-resident PhD programs take 2 years (US equiv. 4years).

The quickest route to an PhD equivalent is a German Doctorate of Law that you can do after your first German Law exam (min study 4years avg. 5years - equiv. to an U.S. JD) and followed by the second German law exam (additional 2years equiv. to an U.S. Bar). Most do their German Doctorate of Law in less than a year - some in 6 months - between the first and the second law exam - hence the large amount of lawyers in Germany with doctoral degrees.

"I believe that in the UK students have a master's degree before starting a PhD program"

Definitely not true - unless this has changed recently. I went pretty much directly from a 4 year BSc(Hons) to working as an Research Associate while attempting a PhD.

Interesting. My only source for this is the book "How to Get a PhD" by Phillips and Pugh.

From looking around it appears that the research councils now require a Masters degree before they will fund you for a full-time PhD studentship - but that's the funding body, not the entrance requirement for a particular university/department. I'm pretty sure that didn't used to be the case (I considered doing a PhD via a research council studentship before I got offered an RA post).

Note my knowledge is probably wildly out of date - my experience in academia was from '89-'95.

There might also be other sources of funding that don't have this requirement - unless you are converting from another area and need the Masters to get up to speed I'm not sure what it would achieve. All of the people I knew who did have an MSc before doing a PhD had done a "conversion" MSc.

I finished a 3 year electrical engineering undergrad in 2008 and went straight into a PhD (which I then finished just under 3 years later)

Not quiet.

To make up for the amazing improvement in teaching and ever rising school exam results over the last 20years we have had to add an extra year to the traditional 3year undergrad course. For some reason we don't understand these increasingly brilliant school students don't seem to have done any calculus for example before arriving for a physics degree.

The extra 'honours' year of the degree is normally called a MSci/Meng - to differentiate it from a real MSc masters degree. There is usually an option to stop after 3 years and get a normal BSc. Most research councils require the four year version.

The reason British PhDs were nominally 3years is that UK ugrad programs were totally in the nominal subject, there is no minor or required arts/humanities courses - you just do a single subject every lecture.

Similarly a PhD traditionally has no taught courses or required extra material, just do the research 24x7. And since the research councils gave you a grant you could live on there was no need to teach/TA more than a nominal amount for experience (and beer money)

As an academic in math (perhaps the lab sciences are different, I speak only for what I know), I find this absurd. Perhaps mathematicians are nicer than other academics, but within math I have never heard firsthand of any story of this kind.

The advice given is breathtakingly cynical. You take risks by sharing your accomplishment, yes, but if you don't describe your accomplishment to others then you are depriving yourself of oxygen. Communication is the lifeblood of science, and in math at least, others are 1000x more likely to help you than to screw you over.

I would recommend, to anyone pursuing a Ph.D. in math at least, that they categorically ignore this advice. Hell, I'm confused as to why anyone prepared to believe this would want to get a Ph.D. at all.

I have a PhD in Applied Math from one of the Math departments in the country, and now do biomedical research. Believe me, the cynicism is well placed.

I wanted to get a PhD because I believed as you do. The fact is, though biomedical research is a field where cheating can take you a long, long way. The experiments have gotten so big and expensive that scientific accountability is at an all-time low (for example, check out this commentary [1] on pre-clinical cancer research. And the money in biomedical research attracts power-hungry people. At the same time, the pressure to publish in order to obtain grant funding is enormous, and the incentives to cheat to get ahead by e.g. playing games with credit or retarding competitors with sly reviews is correspondingly intense.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...

  TLDR: drug company attempts to replicate results of high-impact cancer
  biology research papers, in a search for new drug targets.  Failed to
  replicate the claims in 47 out of 53 papers.  Authors refused to
  provide materials necessary for replication until company signed NDA
  stating they would not publish the results of the replication
  attempts.  One author tells the head of the replication effort "Well,
  we only got this result 1 time out of 5 repetitions, but we decided to
  report the 1 instead of the other 4, because it's the better story."
  (NDA story is from the subsequent Nature clarification, sentence 4 is 
  from a news report on the commentary.)

Er, s/one of the/one of the best/ :)

As someone who spent time with both biology and computer science PhDs, every bit of that article is true when applied to biology (much less so in computer science, and probably none of it applies to math). Actually it gets worse in biology than what the article describes. There are networks of "friends" established across the country which survive by sharing credit as much as possible. (Someone should write a paper on how such cliques get established -- it is almost like Darwinian evolution, except the other way around.) Members of those cliques often have impressive publication records, but when you start drilling down to what their individual contribution was to each paper, you start believing that you are watching some circus unfold in front of you. In an individual lab, members of such cliques can achieve significant power and influence (since friends know tricks to get paper closer to publication) even despite the fact that their individual ability to interpret experimental data is often very unimpressive to put it nicely.

It's an article about biology, where it's actually understating the behavior, as others have noticed. The subtext that no one has pointed out yet is how provincial biology is. Biologists fervently ignore other fields. I think it's partially because they're not as bright as physicists, chemists, or other scientists, partially because they are poorly trained, and partially because it would be so embarrassing to have their culture contrasted with a healthier one.

Yes, yes, and yes, however I believe one of the primary reasons why the academic culture in the field of biology became toxic is that it had become a common practice to have multiple authors in a publication. Initially the practice was quite benign because many experiments indeed require expensive instruments and knowledge of some quite specialized skills, however, this practice was kept unchecked (there is no real penalty of any sort how many authors you add to the paper, except that some authors themselves may object to having to share credit), which allowed for cliques to become established where you basically have a few "friends", and you try to add those friends to every paper you publish for some very minor help/advice they offer, and your friends in turn try to add you to every paper they publish for very minor help/advice from you. This has become an effective method to boost publication count and thus ability to obtain funding without doing any real hard work.

It's because biologists, like social scientists, are too busy massaging their data until it yields the intended result.

I've seen these sorts of things happen, and had one paper where the author list was a subject of much debate. Though it seems much more common in the life sciences.

I'm pretty sure the advice given was sarcasm.

Sucks to be this guy, but that's academia for you and the described situation is not surprising at all. Academia has all the petty jealousy and small town politics of rural hick towns populated by the Hatfields and McCoys.

Given that it's a total wash out, this guy should name and shame.

This is one of the worst articles I've ever seen posted at HN. All seven of the writer's (extremely paranoid and passive aggressive) tips could be obsoleted by one single alternative: post your paper on the arXiv. The author seems to have a tinfoil-hat-tier view of science, and has absolutely no business selling a book to grad students. The seventh tip in the article ("be male") makes me wonder whether this writer has any experience at all doing science in the past twenty years (he mentions Rosalind Franklin, 1920-1958, way to be contemporary!)

> All seven of the writer's (extremely paranoid and passive aggressive) tips could be obsoleted by one single alternative: post your paper on the arXiv.

That's incredibly naive. If you make a breakthrough discovery in biology and you unilaterally post it on arXiv (or wherever) before submitting it to a journal, your advisor will probably strangle you, at best.

I'm a professor. If my student unilaterally posted something on arXiv, I would strangle him/her, at best.

1) How do you know the subject matter is one of those covered by the arXiv? 2) How do you know the student has posting rights? Those require endorsement by an authorized poster, which would be most likely to contact the PI if asked. 3) Even if posted to the arXiv, a paper can be removed by the moderators. 4) What do you think would happen to the student if he posted the paper to the arXiv without the PI's consent?

Conclusion: yours is one of the worst comments I've ever seen posted at HN.

That might have been intended as irony. On the other hand: this is probably the first time the "word" 'beeyotch' has appeared in any forum associated with Science magazine.

Read the steps again. They are pure sarcasm.

This is a humor column.

Credit and recommendation are fundamental to any human endeavor - whether applied to Ph.D candidates, poverty and access to capital, patents, or a plethora of other complex societal issues. If nothing else, I always find it interesting to learn how different sections of the society deal with these issues.

Though, I did like the other PhD article(http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf) on HN better as it provides a more balanced story.

I wonder if Ph.D candidates in Psychology whose dissertations are on credit and recommendation ever have these issues?

Just cuz you understand the system, doesn't mean you are free from it.

First of all, the link's title is misleading, a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student, the text doesn't say anything about that.

Second, is the story supposed to be true or just a story? "Yet my friend, whom we’ll call Ben, was set to do just that." - the whole thing reads more like a setup to the book the article is trying to push.

...a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student...

This is actually not true. PhD students have to advance to candidacy, which requires completing a set amount of coursework and passing a qualifying exam; this usually takes 1-2 years. Therefore, most first-year PhD students are not yet PhD candidates.

> PhD students have to advance to candidacy, which requires completing a set amount of coursework and passing a qualifying exam

This varies from university to university. Some of them do not have the qualifier exams and you are working towards your PhD from day one. Although there is usually some amount of course work still involved as overall requirements for graduating.

Everywhere I've been, "candidate" is a technical term and first-years are definitely NOT. But even if there are universities where you become a candidate upon admission, presumably you remain a candidate all the way to the end, so "...a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student..." is STILL quite wrong.

Fair enough. Every program I was accepted to, though, did not grant you candidacy from the start as you first had to complete your courses and pass one or more exams.

I went to CMU LTI and they don't have a candidacy exam. As per this link: http://www.cs.uccs.edu/~gsc/phdProgramComparison.htm UTA and UMD don't have one. I checked Univ of Edinburgh and INRIA across the pond and they also don't seem to have one. All this is for the computer science PhD programs only. Things may be different for pure sciences.

A few British universities did have candidacy. There was a financial penalty from the research council if a certain percentage of your students didn't finish in 3 or 4 years - so the university would make everyone a candidate and only count them as a PhD student for the stats once it looked like they would do OK. Eventually this evolved to being a candidate right up to when you submitted so there was a 100% completion rate but the research councils wised up to the scam.

The conclusion of the article is sad - the great scientist is becoming a lawyer. There are already too many lawyers http://abovethelaw.com/2011/06/the-oversupply-of-lawyers-in-...

"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." -Sayre

Franklin didn't share in the 1962 Nobel for the simple reason that she was dead.

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