How Bad Luck and Bad Networking Cost Douglas Prasher a Nobel Prize (2011) | Hacker News Reader

How Bad Luck and Bad Networking Cost Douglas Prasher a Nobel Prize (2011)

discovermagazine.com

105 pointswallflower35 comments

Many of the challenges Prasher faced were hardly unique to him. Scientific opportunities often appear only at specific times and places, potentially a serious impediment for a parent who doesn’t want to relocate the family. Do your work in the wrong place, or publish it in the wrong journal, and it may vanish without a trace. And once someone drops out of science, it is hard to get back in.

Bad timing/luck was compounded by the fact that he was a bit of a loner and not driven to follow through on that area of research, even when given the opportunity to do so.

One other issue that this story brings up: There are a lot of out-of-work postdocs and PhDs, owing to the major reduction in funding/grant opportunities and the consolidation taking place in certain industries, such as pharma. A very talented science blogger who covers this (as well as biochemistry research) is Derek Lowe -- I recommend bookmarking his blog at http://www.pipeline.corante.com/

Here's a really really grim (but very well written) account of the postdoc landscape. The short version is that the present tightening is just a a prelude to what many in the field see as a much bigger storm. The killer line is this one:

“I was always told the myth as a child that we need scientists and I get here and find out that we don’t need scientists.”

http://brooklynquarterly.org/pink-ribbons-red/

This is one of the things that science educators struggle with these days -- we need people who are knowledgeable about science, but is it really right to encourage students to go into science when we know what the landscape looks like?

At a minimum, kids who "want to grow up to be a professor" should be told in no uncertain terms what the prospects look like, so they at least go in with open eyes.

The most surprising thing is that the whole chain of events seems to have been nobody's intent. From wikipedia:

Chalfie and Tsien invited Prasher and his wife, Virginia Eckenrode, to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony, as their guests and at their expense. All three of the 2008 Chemistry laureates thanked Prasher in their speeches.

In June 2010, Prasher was finally able to return to science, working for Streamline Automation in Huntsville until December 2011, then from 2012 on, in Roger Tsien's lab at the University of California in San Diego.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher)

As someone who got my PhD in Roger Tsien's lab at that time and attended the Nobel ceremony, I strongly agree with this comment, that it was no one's intent. Many people interpret this story as though Tsien or Chalfie stole something from Doug Prasher, which isn't true. This is more a story that science is hard, people don't always follow through on projects, and there is also some luck involved. There are plenty of "fourth" people who didn't get Nobel Prizes.

> There are plenty of "fourth" people who didn't get Nobel Prizes.

It would make for an interesting topic of its own. I know at least two myself.

I agree this "forgotten wo/men" would make a great blog. Important in science, startups, athletics, essentially every competitive endeavor.

The the woman who grew the DNA crystals that enabled Watson and Crick to do their model. Almost all scientific progress is an extended team effort both laterally and vertically in time. You have the draw the line somewhere. If they gave each prize to 100s of people, we would lose interest. They also don't award it posthumously

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

I didn't realize she had died so young (only 37 years old).. I can't imagine the volume of potential work that was lost with her passing.

Has anyone got any tips on networking? I'm not really sure how to do it. I'll meet researchers at conferences and introduce myself, but they will have surely forgotten about me once the conference is over.

There's two things I'm trying to do to help with this. The first is to get as many collaborations with different people as possible. Most of my work so far has a lot of different names on each paper, and I feel this is useful in that co-authors might remember me when they're starting a new research project. The second thing I'm trying is to create an online presence. I was initially opposed to this for a long time because it feels like "tooting my own horn" but at the same time, it's starting to feel like a necessity. So I created a LinkedIn, a ResearchGate page, and a little personal webpage.

The best way to network in science is to be earnest and unafraid.

Earnest in that you take a genuine interest in understanding (and not just undercutting) other people's work, and unafraid in that you're not afraid to email anyone questions, talk to them at conferences, or ask to stop by and chat when you're traveling through their city.

After doing this for several years I basically accidentally found myself 'highly networked.'

The secret to networking is to think of it less like, "how many people can I meet and exchange contact info with?" and more like, "who's the ONE person here I'm supposed to meet?" -- and when you find that person, spend lots of time. Think of these opportunities as a time to fine one friend.

I'm still internalizing that "Who's the ONE" recommendation, after years of watching my "Got to catch them all" strategy consistently show low returns. Thank you for reminding me to switch to the better one. :)

Just like anything else, you have to guess where the greatest value will be, and focus your work there. Yeah, probably most people you meet at conferences will forget you--that's ok. Pick the few that seemed most promising, or with whom you got along with, and follow up with them. Don't let them forget you.

> co-authors might remember me when they're starting a new research project

If you're co-author with someone, that is a pretty good start! The work of networking is to take the "might" out of the equation. If you stay in touch with them regularly, they will definitely remember you.

Do something that people can't ignore.

Easier said than done.

"Prasher’s trip would have been impossible without the sponsorship of biologist Martin Chalfie and chemist and biologist Roger Tsien, who not only invited the Prashers but paid for their airfare and hotel. Chalfie and Tsien, along with Osama Shimomura, an organic chemist and marine biologist, had won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry."

Osamu Shimomura, not Osama Shimomura!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Shimomura

Fascinating - this is essentially the backstory to Breaking Bad in real life. If Prasher goes bald, time to worry.

As someone who is notoriously bad at social networking, I can relate. Life would be so much easier if we could just ignore our own vanities.

Am I the only one who see this story as almost identical to Walter White, which research when he was young, made his friends ultra-rich?

That "special offer for 20 copies of discover magazine" hovering monstrosity has to be the most offensively oversized ad I have ever seen on a link submitted to this site.

Agreed. That was one of the worst sites I've ever seen in terms of percent of content visible. I couldn't even read the entire first sentence without closing ads and scrolling.

Around 40% of my view was header and navigation, another 25% ads, another 25% "social" junk, and maybe %10 for the headline and part of the first sentence of the story.

Needless to say, I didn't bother trying to read the article.

I agree, not a million miles from this: http://www.lingscars.com/

Is that for real?

Ling Valentine was the keynote speaker at The Future of Digital Marketing 2012. Basically, her site is built to be emotionally engaging, personally branded, and completely different from what you'd expect from a car site. She attracts customers who don't want to deal with a traditional car dealer because of their reputation.

Video of her talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xZZ1c7diUI#t=535

Yeah, I actually did a little digging, and to make a very unoriginal comment, the site appears to be un-ironic.

That said, my first and last desire is to close tab and flee screaming. But if it works for her ...

"Reputation" is ... hardly what I'd see being established in a good way by that site though.

One observation: her site is very strongly reminiscent of many native Kanji sites (I'm slightly more familiar with Japanese and Korean than Chinese websites), which lack a number of the typical signifiers of emphasis which are found in Western / Roman characterset communications. The result is an interface that's typically exceptionally loud. Ling's site is in many ways a direct transliteration of that design motif to English.

Took me a minute to realize I'd already fixed the site via stylebot: http://stylebot.me/styles/7761

But yeah, annoying.

I'm not running any ad blockers, but I didn't see the ad. I even went to the site to see if I'd missed it through ads blindness, but I couldn't find it.

Firefox on Linux, for the record.

if you copy the url into an incognito browser you can see it if you really want to.

So if he had the vision AND cloned AND published on GFP, why exactly was he not included on the Nobel? Not being an active scientist shouldn't matter. It saddens me that more people wouldn't refuse such honors without Prashers' inclusion. The money differential of inclusion would hardly be life changing, but the nobility differential of the honorees would be.

Because he wasn't one of the ones who turned GFP into a tool. Chalfie and Tsien didn't get the prize for discovering something interesting about the world, they got it for making a tool which revolutionised cell biology.

Turning the clone into the tool required the usual resources of brains, skill, and luck, but it also took years and years of hard graft - Tsien's lab in particular has put an insane amount of work into building an entire rainbow of practically useful fluorescent proteins. I'm sure Prasher would have been only too happy to have bent his shoulder to bear his share of that graft, but sadly, things didn't go that way, and so, in the end, it wasn't him did the work, and it wasn't him who won the prize.

But yeah, poor guy. Academia is an incredibly hard road, and it sheds good people at every level. I was lucky enough that when my scientific career ran out of runway, i had programming to fall back on. Not all of my former colleagues have been so lucky.

It's always a very difficult call who to include, given that science is not done in isolation and at most three people can share the price. I don't think not being an active scientist had anything to do with it.

It seems like he should be one of the three. I think the actual honorees shouldn't have accepted the prize without his inclusion. That would have been the noble thing to do.

Glad I know what to do the next time I'm nominated. Guess I've been getting lucky so far.

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