Science Life

If you look up the word “science” in the Merriam Webster’s dictionary, you will find the following definition: “(1) the state of knowing: knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding; (2) a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study; (3) knowledge or a such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena.”

I think these definitions are accurate and explain much of what “science” really means, but they are missing a nuanced point that differentiates true scientists from the charlatans. This is that to be truly involved in scientific investigation, the investigator must be willing to adapt his/her system of knowledge according to the current best observational data available, and in the presence of observational data that contrasts with their system of knowledge, that system must be adjusted, or abandoned, to take into account the current data.

To be a scientist means to be a master of change and to be a chameleon that can adjust his/her framework of understanding at any time.

Why am I bringing up this point? I am bringing this up because too often we come across scientists that are actually unwilling to adjust their framework of understanding. These scientists may even occupy privileged positions in the hierarchy of the scientific establishment. I would consider these people as dogmatic, and this is based on factors that are outside of objectivity, observation and purely scientific considerations, such as funding interests, educational considerations, career ambitions, business relationships, or most often, personal pride or ego.

How often have you come across someone that calls themselves’ a scientist but refuses to abandon a theory they’ve held on to for years and years? Because that theory is the lab’s “bread and butter” for publications or funding? How often do these so-called scientists abandon that theory if they encounter data that counters it?

How often do the funding agencies interfere with scientific inquiry because they have imposed limits on the field of inquiry or they have biased the outcome of the investigation?

In my opinion these obstructions to pure and true scientific inquiry are rampant in today’s academic research community. It is nearly impossible to adjust academic scientific directions in the middle of a funding cycle, because of fears jeopardizing the funding commitments or prospective for renewal of future funding. It is extremely difficult to propose radical scientific ideas that are outside of the established scientific establishment’s thinking, but fit the observed data, and expect to get steady funding precisely because they are risky and currently not understood.

And also, in today’s funding environment that encourages commercialization and translation of basic research (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for society, but rather an inaccurate understanding of the historical record that basic scientific inquiry leads to unexpected results and unforeseen commercial applications), it is becoming more and more difficult to gain funding support for basic research that challenges current industrial practices.

It has forever been thus, it seems. Galileo Galilei was branded a heretic for challenging the established geocentric view of space. Francis Bacon and René Descartes wrote that science at its heart must be empirical, and to be empirical requires constant re-evaluation and adjustment of one’s views; that it took until the 17th century to codify such concepts proves the power of dogmatic and rigid world-views had over civilization. Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity were so revolutionary that they are still be challenged to this day.

It bothers me that in most educational institutions, obtaining an undergraduate or graduate degree in science does not require formal training in the history and philosophy of science. It could be that rote learning and regurgitation of facts and figures may suffice to grant one the title of “scientist”, while that person can be totally ignorant or mis-informed about the historical development of science and therefore totally ignorant of how to think and act in the truest sense of the word.

It seems that stubborn, rigid, dogmatic, arbitrary, biased so-called “scientists” are everywhere and unfortunately, those with the understanding of the true nature of science in being flexible, adaptable, responsive, pliable and objective must fight against the forces of dogma. This requires a strength of will and force of character that is rare, but I know that only those scientists that are strong enough to adjust their worldviews according to observation have the ability to find their way closer and closer to what we all seek: truth.

The last entry in my three-party series on science communication is focused on the ever difficult task of giving a scientific research talk. It is difficult for so many reasons: nervousness that is natural to public speaking, lack of experience in how to work with presentation software, vocabulary issues, the time constraints that are placed on talks, or any of other personal reasons.

I’ve attended hundreds of scientific talks and presentations in my career. They ranged from ground-breaking, to solid scientifically but unspectacular, to downright awful. In the course of anyone’s scientific career, they develop a sense for what “works” and what “doesn’t work” in talks, what an exciting talk is, and what a boring talk is. Here I attempt to share my tips on what makes a great scientific talk and hopefully you can learn from these ideas and improve any talks that you give. 

What makes an amazing talk

Have you ever seen a movie or read an book that excited you and motivated you to try something new and exciting, or to improve yourself? 

I believe that scientific talks have the same power to inspire, enlighten, transform and (without sounding melodramatic) have the power change their lives. In my life, the best talk I’ve ever witnessed was Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” presentation which he gave in a number of cities around the world. I admit that part of my positive reaction to his talk was my personal feelings on the subject of climate change, but I am absolutely sure that his talk was also one of the most technically appealing and inspiring presentations I have ever heard. 

Mr. Gore’s talk was not the typical “pure science” talk that we have all seen in the course of our university or scientific careers in that Mr. Gore attempted to relate complex scientific data in a manner that was emotionally charged and moving to a non- specialist/general audience. While Mr. Gore’s life’s work and the topic of climate change is controversial (it shouldn’t be; this is scientific fact), that isn’t a topic for this blog. My point is that those of us that do deliver “pure science” talks can learn from this presentation and improve our own talks. Here I list a few tips that the best talks, like Mr. Gore’s, always incorporate. 

Clarity and Figures 

The presentation should make liberal use of figures and avoid long stretches of text. Some of our research results lend themselves to being easily presented in a figure or graph; for the rest, take the time to come up with a figure. Figures and pictures are the easiest, clearest, and most effective way to show your data. Never read lines of text from your slides. It is lazy and ineffective. 

Flow

Your slides show flow from one to the next, both in scientific result presented, but also in your delivery. For example, after presenting slide 1, talk about the implications of this result and how it brought up further questions, which you studied and present in slide 2. Plan how you will describe slide 1 and leave what you say open-ended so as to flow into discussion about slide 2. 

Stay on time! Nothing annoys listeners more than going over your allotted time. There is always too much data than what can fit in your talk so don’t even bother trying to fit everything you have into the talk. Practice your talk numerous times so you know the timing per slide and overall length. 

Message

The talk should have an overall message. What should readers go home remembering? If you had to ask an audience member in a week from now what was it they remembered from your talk, what would it be? Make that the focus on your talk. Each slide should also have a message or a succinct point. Stay “on message” for each slide--sometimes speakers go off on tangents and tell stories or personal anecdotes, which makes for a more personal and connective approach, but this throws the talk’s momentum off and affects the total presentation delivery time. 

Audience

Be aware of your audience. Tailor your vocabulary, complexity level, and even the overall message you want to deliver for your talk. Do not “dumb it down”, as you are probably still presenting your work to a scientific audience who probably still has some familiarity with your field, but be aware that different audiences look for different conclusions and implications from research.

Organize and Rehearse

Rehearse and be prepared. Practice practice practice with your colleagues that are close to you work, and also with people that are not close. This latter group will bring up perspectives and questions you may not have thought of. If you are recycling an old talk, never assume you remember the presentation; rehearse anyway. Find the room you will be giving your presentation in, and when it is empty practice your talk. This will help you familiarize yourself with the setting, where you will stand, the technical set up, where the audience will be sitting, the acoustics, the microphone, and all those elements that will help you become more comfortable when you finally do deliver the talk. Don’t bother with “organizational” slides (those that say “my talk will first have an introduction, then I’ll talk about this, then I’ll have conclusions”). It’s obvious. All talks have that format. You shouldn’t need to say it; these types of slides just waste time. 

Technique and confidence

Face your audience. Dress for the occasion. Take the talk seriously. Be upbeat, smile, relaxed and confident. Confidence can be hard to develop, and for this I recommend practice practice and more practice.

It is easy to say these things but they play a major role in your audience’s respect for you, the topic, and your work.

After the talk

The second part of this series discusses another written form of scientific communication. This is the research poster, which is an important component of a scientist’s portfolio of work. The research poster is also an essential part of scientific conference attendance and as such they form the backbone of scientific research results that are communicated and discussed with the greater community. Posters are a gateway to one’s research prowess and the lab’s expertise, and open discussion, exchange of ideas, exchange of criticism (always a major stress for any presenting scientist), and opportunities for collaborations. Therefore, it is important to master the skill of creating an effective poster.

In my experience, it is rare to find a good research poster. It is nearly always mishandled in some fashion; I'm guilty of this myself. There are many reasons for this, which will come up in my tips below, but perhaps an important reason is that there is no organized manner in which budding scientists are actually taught how to make a good poster. If you’re so lucky as to have a helpful and experienced co-worker, or to have a graduate supervisor willing and able to explain the details of putting together a poster, then there shouldn’t be a problem. Yet in my experience too often no one is there to explain what makes a good poster and a bad poster, so typically how we learn is frustratingly through trial-and-error. Hopefully these tips will go a long way to helping you.

Pro tips

★Spend as much time planning the poster as putting it together. Ask yourself these questions:

What results do I have? What do the results tell me? What's it the punchline?

What is the best way to present the results, what figures should I make?

I should be able to explain all my results with a figure, and if I can't, what amount of text is sufficient to get the point across?

What do I want the reader to appreciate from my work?

★Be focused on a specific message. Every poster should leave the reader with a take- home message, a punchline. I've seen way too many posters that are crammed with every last little experimental result and detail. So much detail is unnecessary, and worse, 9 times out of 10 the readers won't spend so much time at your poster as to read or absorb it all. Include only the most salient points and explain them succinctly.

★Remember the goal of a poster is to start a conversation. Tailor your figures to be easily understood and highlight the main findings. Tailor the poster to encourage the reader to ask questions about what you did find and what you didn't find, what the problems were, and what you plan on doing next. Choose figures that you can refer to when discussing the poster; I always find myself referring to figures in my poster when discussing the work with people, and *never* do I refer to some blurb of text. Format the poster to be a tool to aid discussion.

★Don’t overload! Whitespace is your friend. Use figures as often as you can. Minimize text!!!!! Maximize figures!!!! I can't stress this enough. I see posters crammed with 10 point font, and pages upon pages of text, which of course is totally unreadable to someone standing 2 feet away. Let's be honest--it's easier to just type up a paragraph than to put together a nice figure. Don't be lazy. Invest the time in making good figures and they will make a world of difference.

★Think about your experience in walking a row of posters and keep that in mind when writing the text and creating figures. People a) won’t have the time to read all the text because conferences have many more posters to see, b) won’t be able to absorb it all because they will be thinking about everything else they've experienced at the conference, c) should be talking to you about your poster and therefore shouldn't be reading, and finally, d) will be intimidated or overloaded by too much text. They just won’t read it all! A research figure is worth 1000 words.

★Tailor your poster to your expected audience. I have made the mistake of setting up the message of a poster inappropriately for the audience, and I ended up being disappointed and frustrated that it didn't elicit much of a response or start discussion. I had nobody to blame but myself. Use appropriate language, include relevant results, and include necessary background material so your audience will be able to truly understand and appreciate your work.

★Poster sessions are also networking sessions. We are so focused on our work that sometimes we forget that networking is a huge part of attending a conference. It’s a dreaded word sometimes in science, but through your research poster you will immediately have something to talk about with total strangers, and before you know it you’ve made a new contact. While talking about your poster don’t forget to also get to know the reader.

Most people picture scientists as wearing white lab coats, mixing big beakers of colored fluid with steam bubbling out, or loading agarose gels. Those of us actually doing science know that communicating through writing and presentation takes up a lot of our time and are vital parts of our work. Ultimately, our work relies on without sharing it with colleagues and the general public on the whole.

In this 3-part series I will highlight what I think are the habits of highly effective scientific communicators. The three parts will cover writing articles, designing and presenting research posters, and giving scientific talks.

Part 1 - Writing scientific articles

If your research is successful, you will have the privilege of writing an article for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. This is the "currency" of science; scientists are evaluated on and defined by their papers, and often research papers are the only way scientific colleagues will connect. It is enormously important to write good papers and publish in good journals.

General advice 

Know when is the right time to publish. Research can go on forever; there is always more to do. However, data can become stale if the field has moved beyond your results, or worse yet, your results could be reproduced and published by someone else (you could get "scooped"). Don't forget that getting your work published could result in unforeseen collaborations or improvements to your work, not to mention career advancement. There is an appropriate time to make your contribution so don't wait forever for the perfect paper; get your results out there. 

Plan your writing.  Expect to go through many versions, and expect the process to take a long time. It is important stay focused and patient. If your colleagues or PI are taking their time writing or editing your drafts, keep reminding them (bugging them?) and point out the importance to everyone involved of getting the work published.

Ask colleagues / collaborators to help edit. Use their impartial eye, especially after you have read the paper yourself dozens of times and you won't be able to think as objectively about the work.

Use the active voice to stay engaged with the reader. Use words that "sell" the work and highlight it's importance..but don't exaggerate, stay factual. It's a fine line. You want to excite the reader but it's poor form to use superfluous/exaggerating words. Let your PI decide on authors and their order! This is a minefield since authorship is so important to our careers in science. See my blog on Managing Scientific Collaborations for more on this issue; you should have sorted out authorship at some point during the collaborative research process.

Think of your paper as telling a "story". What are you trying to say? Frame your paper as a closed circle--you had a reason for doing the research, it had a specific result, and here is what it means. Shape the paper to tell a specific message that has implications for your field.

The nuts-and-bolts of writing

Write the Results section first. By now you should have all of your experiments/calculations completed, and they should be fresh in your mind.  As you write you will quickly realize if you do not have all the results you need for your story.  Format your writing into paragraphs with each paragraph having "a point". Each paragraph should start with a tie in to the previous section (my favourite phrase is "having proven X, we were then interested in investigating Y"). The next sentences should comprise the experimental setup, followed by description of the observations.

Make your Figures as they arise when writing up the Results text.  The Results section should be factual and not speculative or elaborative of how the results impact the field, or future work.  That’s for the Discussion section.  As you write the Results, you will think of points that you want to elaborate on further or speculate on, so jot these in bullet points for the Discussion section.  

The next section to write is the Discussion, which is the place to explain how your work answers the major questions you wanted to answer and how your work fits into the broader field. The layout of paragraphs should be the inverse of the Results section. Start with a very short recap of your results, followed section-by-section discussion/analysis of your results. End with a synthesis of the data interpretation. It helps to use models or mechanisms/pathways that the data suggests, and use another figure for this. End your discussion section by covering what is the next logical step that your research suggests should follow. What would be your next step in the research?

In the Discussion, keep speculation to a minimum. It's easy to over-interpret your data and reach grander conclusions than it supports. It's important to resist this temptation!

Next you are ready to write the Introduction, which should be almost an inverse of the Discussion.  For me, the content of the Introduction very much depends on how things fleshed out in the Results and Discussion section, and so it must be written after those. The Introduction should “set the stage” for what you will tell in the Results and what you will elaborate on in the Discussion, which will reflect back to the Intro. The Intro should start extremely broad. I.e. if you are studying a gene with implications in a disease, begin your paper with a brief description of the disease and the importance of studying it. Next, discuss past results in the field, what is still unknown and what are the main unanswered questions. Next, introduce your specific research focus and tie the description into those unanswered questions. A last paragraph should have a brief snapshot of what you proved and should serve to entice the reader to read the rest of your paper. 

The abstract is the last section to write.  This is because it is limited in length and focus; it must be incredibly on-point and should describe only the key introductory points and major findings of your paper.

Make your figures in the highest resolution possible. The digital reproduction process that journals use will affect and may reduce the quality of your figures so give them the maximum acceptable quality to start with. 

Keep all versions of your files and use a naming scheme like "July17 version PS", where PS are my initials. You will inevitably go back to previous versions so be sure to stay organized.

Target journal selection 

Decide on a target journal early on as this will affect the writing style, length, format (separate results and discussion sections?), number of figures, and brevity (JMB papers are notoriously long, while Science papers--if you are so lucky to publish there--are notoriously short). When you have target journals in mind go to their websites and look at the "instructions to authors" sections and criteria for submission. Print these out and stick to the guidelines, including for the figures. 

The target journal should allow your work to be seen by a wide audience. I advise to stay away from overly specialized journals as the audience may be too small. 

The target journal should have as high of a reputation/readership/impact factor as possible. I won't get into a debate on the worthiness of the impact factor as a judge or journal quality, but remember, your papers are the primary way the scientific world will know about you. It is important to publish in good journals that many people will see. Everyone wants to go to top journals but realize a couple of articles in mid-level journals where your work is solid are just as good as a Nature paper. I would argue breadth of readership and quality of the underlying science is as important as impact factor or journal prestige.

Conclusion

This concludes my post on proper scientific article writing. With these tips you should be prepared to tackle the task of writing up your research and sharing it with the scientific community.

In our capitalistic society, marketing, advertising and salesmanship are everywhere around us. We are inundated with messaging, slogans, signs and other ways to catch our attention and send us messages to part with our money to buy products.

In academic world, there is also marketing and messaging that surrounds research. Even within the primary literature, there are eye-catching titles, subtitles, conclusions and sometimes grand statements about the importance of that piece of work. Our work is published on websites, press releases and in magazines.

Thinking about marketing applies to me since in the middle of writing and editing papers with my supervisor. I’ve noticed I’m never good at “selling” my story strongly enough. My strengths are in the objectivity, technicality and purity of the science itself. I haven’t yet learned how to package the work into a product that can be “pitched” to higher quality journals. Not being able to sell the story could compromise what is otherwise solid science.

I don’t think I’m the only one that has trouble doing this. I realize it is important to be able to build your science in a way that makes it more attractive than a regular technical document, and in this blog I wanted to discuss how important it is to be a salesperson of science.

Scientists aren’t trained to be salespeople.

In my defence, I have never taken any marketing courses and the curricula of my undergraduate and graduate programs did not have any formal training in this. I think the same can be said of most scientists. We spent our education learning science and while working we spend out time doing science and interpreting the results. Only when publishing becomes key, and after several papers and years of publishing, do we begin to learn the skill of packaging the science into a more attractive product.

“Selling” is not a dirty word.

You might think “why should I sell my work, the science should sell itself and dressing it up only takes away from the science.” I used to naively think that way as well, until I saw PI’s embracing salesmanship as a key component of writing papers.

The more I took part and observed publishing, the more I realized there are many different ways to say the same thing. For example, you could describe your experiment as is typically done in a “Materials and Methods” section in a paper, that is, totally technical, specific…and boring. Or, you could describe the experiment in terms of what was the motivation for that method, what your expectations were, what the result showed and how it affected the field. That is, you can be more descriptive of the science.

Perhaps a less controversial world is “promote.” Promoting / selling your science means describing your work in a way in which the underlying motivations, stories behind the work, its impact on the field, all come through in a stronger way. It doesn’t take away from the science, it is just a better way of transforming the technicalities of the work into something more memorable, attractive and impactful.

What benefits can you gain from better selling your work?

*better communicate the importance of your science. You need to be able to communicate why your work matters, why it should carry on and continue to be funded, and you need to be able to explain the work to non-specialists. Using more impactful, powerful yet clear and concise language can go a long way to communicate how important your work really was.

This doesn’t mean you should exaggerate your work, or use embellishing language. It means realizing that your work is important and not being afraid to make statements that clearly show this importance. It means being clear, direct and robust in the way you present your work so it is obvious to the reader what kind of impact your work will have.

*get your work published into better journals. Science publishing is competitive, and the best journals receive hundreds or thousands of submissions a year. You have to convince the editorial staff that the work is important, that is was rigorously done and interpreted, and that it has important implications for the field. You typically do this in the cover letter, and it is here that you must know how to promote your work. Explain why it represented an important advance and what further work it will inspire and don’t hold back.

*advance your career; establish a name for you and your lab. We meet many people in our careers and we need to stand out. It’s essential for academic scientists to have a niche, an expertise, something they are known for. Scientists, journal editors, potential collaborators are all human, and we have to be aware of the best ways to be memorable. Know how to talk about the work you do in a persuasive way so you can carve out a name for yourself in your field.

*get invited to give talks. In research science it’s important to establish yourself as one of the world’s experts in a particular topic. You want to be invited to give talks as this is an important component of networking, advancing your science and your career.

*set up collaborations. As mentioned in the previous point, you want to be known as an expert in your topic and to do that you must promote your work. This will mean other scientists will approach you for collaboration opportunities and this is absolutely essential to advancing your science!

Having a “story” makes the selling easier.

In a previous blog, I discussed how important it is to wrap your work into a story. In the context of promoting your work, this is very important. Packaging your research into a story that has a “point”, a “punchline”, or basically an impactful and important result, provides a way to share the work promote it. It’s like having an elevator sales pitch–if you had only 10 seconds to describe what you do to something, it has to be clear, concise and effective. Or it’s like making a 30 second commercial for your “product”– the story helps you develop a clear and concise message that will be memorable to others.

What I hope to do is keep these concepts in mind while I write these papers. I know that for scientists, being a marketer is foreign and perhaps even unappealing, but I hope that I’ve shown you here how it important it is even in what should be an objective world of science. There are many benefits to be gained and in today’s competitive academic research environment, every little benefit we can gain is essential in advancing our scientific careers.

“Getting scooped” as a scientist could possibly be the worst thing to happen to us. Next to being denied funding. Or losing our jobs. Ok it’s not the worst thing but it’s still up there. “Getting scooped” means the research you put so much time, effort and funds into has been published by another lab. They get the credit and recognition as the first researchers to make the discovery and therefore they reap the rewards like continued research funding, career advancement and potential collaborations.

And the poor sap that is you loses all that. So what do you do when you get scooped?

1. Emotions

The first thing to do is cry, get angry, punch something, mope around the house...do anything you need to do to get the raw emotions out. Getting scooped isn’t the end of the world but it is certainly a roadblock in the research enterprise so it is good to acknowledge this. Embrace your emotions and let them out.

2. Analyze

After you’ve gone through a period of time letting emotions get the best of you, it is then healthy to begin to move on. The first step to move on is to understand and analyze the situation you are in. What is the research that was published? Is it exactly what you would publish? Did the published data you don’t have? Conversely, do you have data in your back pocket that they did not publish?

Asking yourself these questions will firstly clarify exactly what the situation is and what you are up against. It’s important to clarify the situation because what you need to do next is evaluate whether there is space for you to publish your results as well. After all, getting scooped doesn’t mean you can’t publish your results--it just makes it harder.

3. Plan

Now that you fully understand the situation, you can begin to plan your next steps. You should decide if you can publish the data you currently have, and in what journal.

Would an editor evaluate your research and say it’s the same as that earlier paper? If this is the case, it’s possible that you could publish your work in a “lower tier” journal (as typically measured by the Journal Impact Factor, which isn’t the best indicator these days). I’ve seen this many times so it’s certainly possible you could still publish your work.

Failing this route, or if you decide you are not happy with a lower tier journal, you will have to do more work to differentiate your results from that earlier paper.

4. Work

This means do more research. Now that you are guided by that earlier paper, you can focus on those experiments that will add value to your paper that was not captured in that earlier one. You should focus on experiments that will proceed the “story” to the next logical phase and build upon earlier results.

Realize that you cannot do all possible extra experiments to improve your research. This is a time for concentrating on the core experiments that need to be done to publish, nothing more, and nothing less.

5. Don’t waste time, publish ASAP

Once you get scooped, you are on the clock. The longer you wait to publish, the more that first paper becomes disseminated in the research community and therefore the more recognition and prestige it will have. Practically speaking, this means the probably of the editors of the journals being aware of that first journal will increase, and therefore your chances of publishing your work (if too similar) will decrease.

Don’t take more than a couple of months of experimentation on those core experiments before you have begin to write up your paper. If they work, excellent. If they don’t, forget them. Don’t start any new experiments. Start writing. And don’t take more than a month to write the paper.

6. Keep your chin up

Getting scooped is an emotional experience which is followed by a time of craziness in the lab. You will be working hard to make your work publishable. You may feel that your years of work are wasted.

I’m here to say that isn’t the case. Unfortunately getting scooped is a normal fact of academic science. Competition is a normal fact of life in all vocations. Yet scientists continue their work, labs don’t shut down, students get their degrees, researchers get paid. Life goes on.

It’s important to use this opportunity to get better. To work harder. To work faster. In the end, you will find a niche to publish your work and you will look back on the experience and value it for giving you an extra “push” to complete your research. Good luck!!!

It’s so easy to procrastinate. I even procrastinated writing this blog. I started writing it and then multiple times I just stopped and did something else.

There are aspects of the work of being a research scientist that makes it easy to procrastinate. After all, the next task in the lab is often not obvious and takes time to identify and plan. Certainly, in the training stage of our careers, being in graduate school and working as a postdoctoral fellow requires self-motivation; nobody is forcing you to perform another experiment. You’re in it for your own advancement and often supervisors are hands off. So it’s easy to just..not work.

Compounding these intrinsic factors of being a scientist are extrinsic factors such as becoming distracted with smartphones, social media and the Internet at our fingertips. The Internet has been described as a black hole for our brains and I know exactly what this means when I get started following links upon links.

And so, one wonders, how does anyone in the working world get anything done? How do we defeat the ease with which we can lose focus and lapse into hours of watching cat videos and Angry Birds?

In this blog I will share of the concepts I keep in my mind to prevent me from procrastinating (in theory), and strategies to rescue me from procrastination. Hopefully this will be helpful to you in identifying some of the strategies you could employ in your research careers.

Recognizing why you procrastinate

As in most avenues of life when we want to take control of a situation, the first step is identifying the source of the problem: identify what are the triggers for your procrastination. Are you procrastinating for a specific reason? Is it repetitive? Do you slack off with regularity at certain times during the day, or certain days of the week? Are there certain types of tasks that you tend to avoid doing?

There is always a cause to our procrastination and it is important to identify those that apply to you.

• are you organized? 

Being a scientist involves many concurrent tasks, like running experiments, running simulations, reading literature, writing papers, attending meetings and conferences, or the myriad other activities we do as scientists. So it’s easy to lose to become disorganized and leave our notes thrown around our desks. Also, because experiments and projects take many days to complete, we can lose focus. Or, we can get lost in the minutiae of the technicalities of performing our science that we lose sight of the bigger picture.

To me the easiest way to organize myself is to complete a task and organize my notes and materials related to that task right away. Or if I think of something I need to do, I do it right away instead of shunting it aside to the ever-growing “to do list”. I also organize my time as best as I can. I find it convenient to think of our schedule in blocks of weeks and I set goals for each week, at least a few days in advance.

I take time at least once a week to step back from what I was doing that week and put it into prospective of my overall role in the lab and my set of projects. Did the week’s activities get me closer to answering a scientific question? Did it get me closer to publishing? The answers to these questions will help me organize the following week’s activities.

I use the program Evernote to organize my projects and schedule. I update my notes within that program constantly and immediately. Find whatever method works for you to organize your time and to organize the bigger picture of your career.

• have you set (or been told) an overall direction to your work?

As I mentioned in my introduction, often in science we set our own directions and provide our own motivations. But certainly our supervisors play a role; your work must fit into the overall direction of the lab. Therefore, the direction and overall goal of your research is molded in collaboration with your supervisor. However, that’s not to say that all supervisors do a good job of this, and you may find yourself lost or unsure of what to do next in your work. Then you start procrastinating and avoiding being productive.

It’s important to regularly refresh the goals and direction of your work. It’s important to touch base with your supervisor or colleagues involved in your work and set goals and milestones. Communicate regularly and don’t let problems fester. I find that having clear milestones for a project help me from procrastinating, or at least it takes away the trigger for procrastinating based on being unclear of the direction of my work.

• are you technically prepared to do the work - do you know what comes next?

Sometimes we just do not have the knowledge of our fields well enough to be able to understand what to do next in our work. This clearly will lead to floundering and inefficient use of your time. So the easy answer to this trigger for procrastinating is to make sure you are up to speed with the literature and methods employed in your field, and make sure you communicate with your colleagues if you are unsure of what comes next in your work.

• are you happy in your work? Are you bored or insufficiently challenged?

The last, but certainly not the least important, trigger for procrastination that I wanted to point out here is emotional. If we aren’t happy with our work, we will find any excuse not to do it, including spending hours wasting time. If we aren’t challenged or stimulated, again, we will not work hard.

Being aware of your emotional state is necessary before you can address it and make some positive changes. Some of these changes may include changing your research project, trying new techniques, taking some time off, talking to your supervisor and colleagues and asking for new challenges, or finding a new way to approach your research question. Fundamentally, everyone has a different level of emotional interest or attachment to their work, but it is absolutely necessary to be satisfied with your work to be able to meet your maximum potential and productivity.

Recasting procrastination as “costs”

Just as a perfect vision of capitalism is supposed to work, in my life I have found that when I become aware of the costs of an activity (or inactivity), my habits change to reduce those costs. We can apply this way of thought to fixing procrastination.

We can think of the “opportunity cost” in procrastinating, where the time and effort spent on one activity, while having the benefit of advancing that activity, can also be considered a cost in that it takes time and effort away from spending on another activity. Practically speaking, every hour you spend trying to “zero” your inbox (which inevitably does not last long if you are anything like me), is one hour that is forever lost from performing an experiment in the lab or reading a paper. Therefore, it becomes critical to always consider whether you are making best use of your time, because that time cannot then be applied to another task.

It’s also helpful to keep in mind other consequences of putting off tasks. Often tasks that are put off from being completed become harder to complete the longer they are avoided. We becoming increasingly stressed if we know we are avoiding important work, which makes it more difficult to get into the proper mindset to actually perform that work. In research science, there is the ever-present fear of “being scooped”, and of course if we procrastinate we increase the odds of a competing researcher completing the work and receiving the credit before us.

The flip side of thinking about “costs” are the “benefits” of addressing procrastination. When we work hard and actually get things done, this unlocks so many benefits. These can include opening up more time and flexibility for future work, getting closer to the next step in our career progression or getting closer to a publication, feeling less stressed about avoiding work, and gaining a sense of accomplishment.

Addressing procrastination through baby steps that lead to balance

Having said all of this, we all need breaks and diversions from our regular work routines, and even I have advocated diversifying your activities in and away from research. I advocate finding a balance between work and play.

As well, you don’t have to “fix” your procrastination issues all at once. Make simple goals like cutting down your “procrastination time” by 50% over the course of one week,

and then another 50% over a second week. Accept that identifying the source of your slacking and making changes in your work habits may tack time.

Organize your schedule into blocks of “work” and “play” time, and then follow through with that plan and sticking to your structure. For example, you could say I will solidly work in the lab from 9 until 12, have a 30 minute lunch break, work solidly until 3 pm, have a short break, and then work solidly again until 6 pm. To me, this sets my mind at ease that I can focus on the task at hand rather than stress about what I should do, and I also am comfortable knowing that I will have relief breaks spaced throughout the day.

Prioritize tasks - accept that there are only so many hours in a day and you cannot do everything, so make best use of your time by tackling the most important tasks first.

Thinking of negative versus positive momentum

Finally, I wanted to discuss the role of momentum in productivity. Fundamentally, fighting procrastination is a fight against negative momentum. It is much easier to not do something than it is to actually doing it. So constantly avoiding doing tasks provides a momentum, in a negative sense as this is a momentum we do not want, and therefore the more we procrastinate, the more “negative” momentum we build. It only becomes harder to reverse the trend the longer we procrastinate and pile on to our “to do list”. This is a tradeoff for short-term gain at the cost of long-term pain.

Luckily, I find that tackling tasks before my “to do list” grows because of too much procrastinating is a powerful source of positive momentum. It feels good to get things done. This gives me energy to get even more stuff done. I harness this good feeling and build on it to turn around the negative momentum and build momentum towards the positive effects on my career that I listed earlier.

Being a scientist is complicated (but fascinating). You have to wear many different hats and you have to have many different skills. There are times when you have to be a good communicator and other times when communication doesn’t matter. There are times when you have to be a good team player and work well with others, and then there are times when you have to shut people out and focus on your work.

Similarly, there are times when we have to be detail-oriented and spend hours and hours on seemingly tiny details, but these are necessary to make an experiment work. And then there are times when we have to see the big picture of our work.

Recently, I had a totally unrelated discussion with a friend about home renovating, such as painting, and how these tasks requires being detail-oriented. My mind (wandering as it does) then made a connection to my work, how it involves being detail-oriented..and this got me thinking.

What makes a more effective scientist?  Those who’s strength is in technicalities, facts, figures and details, or a person who is better at reductionist thinking? Or those who’s strengths lie in being able to synthesize these details into a coherent story and into a bigger picture? That is, the type of person that is holistic. I don’t mean being an expert in the pseudoscience of holistic medicine, what I mean is someone that sees beyond the technicalities to see the meaning behind them.

Would I be better at my work if I adopted one of these two ways of thinking? Or would I have more success if I tried to stride between these two?

I’m not really sure. It could require both.

I think as scientists clearly we have to be able to master techniques, algorithms, theories, facts and papers. We have to specialize. As some often jokingly say, we have to be masters of very little, or masters of something nobody else in the world cares about. All of us know that to progress in our education and in our careers we have to be experts in the details of our techniques, our favorite genes, our pathways, our equipment. I don’t think this can be disputed.

But, being specialists is very different from being special. I think special scientists, those that separate themselves from the crowd and progress the furthest in their careers to really change their field, are those that can rise above the fray of the minutiae. The best scientists can pick and choose what details are important. They can identify what details are speaking to an important story or an important result, synthesize those, come up with a unified theory to explain the data, and on top of that, are creative enough to design the next series of work to test that theory. Some of this process requires being detail-oriented, but I would argue these special scientists don’t get lost in culling the weeds and instead are focused on cultivating the forest.

Maybe it’s a natural evolution in the career of a scientist. We start undergraduate studies learning the basics. We progress to graduate school where we start applying those basic principles and start generating knowledge. Through our postdoctoral studies and further on we begin to separate ourselves from those basics and the “grunt work” of being in the lab all day and really start using our minds to advance science.

Or maybe some scientists don’t evolve this way. Using the term “evolve” is difficult because people often take it to mean “improve” but that’s not what I mean here. Some scientists can have meaningful careers spending their time with the details and the technicalities and they can become the world’s expert at them. I’m not taking anything away from this type of scientist, I’m just saying they are different than that other kind. It’s a different way of thinking and requires a different mindset and psychology.

I guess I’m saying I don’t know where I am yet. Perhaps I’m struggling with separating myself from being detail-oriented and trying to rise above this to become more of a holistic thinker.

Academic researchers located in university settings take part in many diverse activities along with overseeing the activities of their research group. One of these activities is teaching undergraduate and graduate students, and clearly the university relies on seasoned researchers to pass on their expertise to the next generation.

However, too often I have come across academic researchers that detest their teaching duties. They say it takes away from their research, supervisory and grant writing time, that teaching requires a lot of work for something that doesn’t obviously benefit their research careers, and that they teach only because they must do so to retain their academic appointments. They say that lecturing to a room full of undergrads isn’t as prestigious as sharing exciting research results to a room full of the world’s experts.

It’s true that teaching takes a lot of effort and that the audience isn’t of the research caliber as the world’s experts, but my teaching experience (albeit limited) has shown me that it’s short-sighted to discount the value of teaching. I believe that teaching does indeed help the researcher in many ways that benefit their own research careers. In this blog I wanted to share the ways teaching benefited me and perhaps this would encourage others to try their hand at it.

You don’t truly know a subject until you have to teach it

The fundamental goal of teaching is to educate a student in a topic they do not have expertise in. To accomplish this goal, the teacher must translate their expertise into terms understandable to the novice. To be successful in this translation requires the ability to identify the foundational principles of a topic and to differentiate between the essential and non-essential aspects. As well, the teacher must be aware of their students’ education level and background knowledge.

Once the core and essential aspects of a topic are identified, and only once the teacher understands where their student is coming from, the teacher must be able to find the medium, the form, and the terminology for communicating the topics. In other words, the teacher must be able to take their expert knowledge and communicate it in a form understandable and appreciable by their students.

To be successful in teaching requires success throughout this chain, and by no means is it easy. Along the way of performing the teaching, teachers realize that perhaps they took their expertise in a topic for granted; perhaps it is has been a number of years since they had to face the basics of a topic, or they had to formulate their thoughts around communicating their expertise in this way.

In my teaching experience, I felt exactly this. Topics I thought I knew very well suddenly became more complex when I had to transform them into a form that I had to communicate. I had to use my experience to discriminate extraneous parts of a topic and to identifying the core principles. As well, as it has been a number of years since I

was an undergrad, I became used to being an expert; it was a challenging process to put myself in the mind of a naive student. The experience was a challenge in itself and it helped me grow as a researcher.

My point is, the process of teaching itself educates the teacher along with the student.

Teaching requires you to step out of your box

As mentioned, the student lacks the knowledge and experience that the teacher has. This dichotomy actually places the student in a position of value to the teacher; they are uninfluenced by prevailing wisdom in a field and can therefore approach the topic with unbiased eyes.

I’ve had the delightful experience of an undergraduate student questioning what I took for an accepted fact in my lectures. I had never questioned the fact myself and seeing it from a different point of view enabled me to truly evaluate whether the accepted wisdom was actually wise.

Fundamentally, this is what science is: constant criticism of accepted wisdom until all criticism is addressed in a way that explains the observed data. To me, students can and often do show teachers how to challenge their perceptions, which ultimately is the path to scientific enlightenment.

Students are sharper than you think and can grasp advanced topics

I have found that the criticism that students, undergraduate or graduate, don’t have the experience or knowledge that can match the world’s scientific experts can be unfounded. I’ve met some very intelligent students that see right through a complex topic to not only grasp the topic, but to intelligently criticize the science and also able to identify future research avenues. Lecturers shouldn’t be afraid to share advanced research topics and the cutting edge of their field. After all, students are the next generation of researchers that will advance science.

Teaching helps your communication, interpersonal and supervisory skills

Clearly teaching is communication. Teaching requires organization. Therefore, undertaking teaching can help the academic with these skills. I think we have all found that being an academic researcher doesn’t require excellent organizational or communication skills; I’ve written blogs on this topic before. I think all of us academics can use practice in speaking, putting together simple and clear presentations, sticking to an allotted time, dealing with questions, thinking on our feet, and general organization of our thoughts.

Most science graduate programs are research-intensive and research-focused. The goal of the science graduate degree, especially the doctorate, at least as it has been traditionally organized, is to prepare the student for a scientific research career in academia, government or industry.

There is nothing wrong with training students for research careers, except for the following. There is an accepted imbalance between the numbers of science graduates and suitable employers, and it has been estimated that as few as 10% of Ph.D. graduates will obtain tenure-track faculty positions, which is the ultimate goal of the typical science graduate program. There have been hundreds of articles describing this problem, so I won't delve into that here, and there are numerous opinions on whether this imbalance is necessarily a "bad thing", or perhaps it creates a healthy competitive environment which leads to hard work, innovative and creative thinking.

A now infamous graphic of the pipeline ahead of PhD graduates

The consequences of this imbalance are clearly evident to anyone graduating with a science graduate degree and experiences the stress of the job search, inadequate number of job choices, and the sacrifices (in terms of location, job type and salary) that are often necessary to obtain gainful employment.

Graduates from humanities or social science graduate programs are well aware of the disconnect between graduate programs and the actual jobs that are available when they graduate. These graduates accept they employment they find may not necessarily be focused exactly on their field of specialization of study; it is probably true that a Ph.D. in ancient Greek art may not have that many jobs to choose from and sacrifices will have to be made.

This situation now exists with science graduate degrees. The "intended" career path of a research career is increasingly (I've seen estimates as high as 40%) not followed by science graduates. What I would like to argue here is that while there is a disconnect between the specific focus on science graduate programs, the science graduate degree actually opens up many career avenues that were not necessarily evident during the training process. The science graduate degree is much more flexible and useful than most of us thought.

How I discovered the unanticipated value of the science graduate degree: my survey of graduate career paths

When I was approaching the end of my Ph.D. studies, I undertook an extensive process of tracking down alumni from biomedical science departments in my univeristy to learn what employment they found. I tracked down as many people as I could, contacted each of them, met with many over coffee, and read as much as I could about possible career paths. I was amazed with the diversity of jobs they had found. To illustrate the diversity, here are a few examples:

Patent Agent

Research Commercialization Analyst

Investment Analyst

Management Consultant

Medical Scientific Liaison

Technical Sales Representative

Research Program Manager

Grants Administrator

Undergraduate Lecturer

Science Communications Specialist

I had not even heard of many of these jobs during my time in graduate school. Certainly my research-intensive graduate program was not explicitly structured on preparing students for these jobs, but clearly graduates from my department had obtained these jobs and were thriving in them.

The result of my search was a revelation for me. I always thought I was undertaking my studies for a faculty position in the future, and little did I know that actually was preparing myself for numerous career choices. The evidence in front of me proved to me that the science graduate degree does indeed prepare graduates for a diverse range of careers.

How a Science Degree Opens These Unanticipated Doors

Most science graduates do not have an appreciation of the array of skills we gain during our training or an understanding of the true value they hold with prospective employers. Admittedly we also often suffer from an inferiority complex; we assume "all we know how to do" is perform experiments. I too used to believe that since science graduates we are trained to do research, and we spent so much of our time doing that, we lacked practical experience in other work. I assumed employers would hesitate to hire us.

These preconceptions couldn't be farther from the truth, as my alumni search proved to me. Specifically, I discovered that the alumnis' employers appreciated that they compiled a great deal of experience and acquired a vast array of valuable skills, such as:

demonstrated ability to plan, organize, execute, analyze and reflect on complex problems: each of our experiments are complex and require analytical skills that are unmatched in many other university programs

analytical training and experience: the rigor, logical thinking and objectivity required to be a scientist are useful in so many different job types

information identification, management, synthesis: through reading, familiarizing ourselves and organizing the scientific literature we show we have the ability to organize vast amounts of information, which is central in many job types

ability to learn and adapt: being a scientist requires an ability to learn new concepts and new techniques, while being able to adapt to a constantly changing field. Having proof of the ability to learn can prove to a prospective employer you can learn their work, even if you don?t have the practical experience when applying

time management skills - we juggle experiments, meetings, reading and writing articles, and so many other tasks, which is required in so many jobs

communication skills in many varieties: every day we use written, oral, interpersonal relations and these clearly find use in all careers

You can relate this valuable skill set back to each of the jobs I listed earlier. Essentially, as holders of graduate degrees, we gain and admirable breadth of skills and we become experts in "knowledge management". These skills are the foundation of the modern economy and increasingly, these types of jobs are being created and titles we never even heard of are showing up in job boards.

Overall then, while science graduate programs are still very research-focused and could use improvement, nonetheless, science graduate degree holders have utilized their degrees in unexpected, creative and rewarding career paths. Each of these takes advantage of the experience that we gain in the scientific research enterprise and the skills we accumulate while taking part in it.

Working or training as a scientist, it is a good bet that you have collaborators that assist, complement, and extend your work (if you don't, I encourage you to get some!). Modern research in the best publications usually involves multiple labs working on distinct and complementary approaches to complex scientific problems. As well, there has been a large growth in the number significant projects involving multiple labs across the world.

During my Ph.D. studies, my supervisor managed the collaborations and I had only a few opportunities to interface with those working with us. If you're lucky, you've had the opportunity to manage your collaborations at some point during your career. This means you've shared data, interacted with your collaborators, wrote papers, or presented work together.

As an associate, and before that as a postdoctoral fellow, I manage collaborations on a daily basis. They are vital to everything I do but managing collaborations is not trivial and I've made some mistakes alongside my accomplishments. I thought I'd share a short list of tips from my recent experience.

Communication is key. I get a lot of emails from collaborators. I finally understand what PI's spend most of their time doing when they are in their office: reading and answering emails from collaborators. It can be time-consuming and we have all experienced the black hole that is your inbox, yet answering emails is one of the most important tasks in a collaboration. Make every effort to reply to emails promptly, completely, and concisely. Communicate your data on a timely basis - don't let it pile up, as your collaborators want to know the details. Set up a monthly meeting or Skype chat, especially for important decisions. This adds a necessary level of face-to-face contact to make the collaboration more personal, it also makes it easier to discuss data or lay out priorities if you don't have to wait for a reply email. It's a good bet your collaborators have a different field of expertise than you and your lab does (that's probably why they are working with you in the first place). In this case, be sure to explain what may seem like basic or trivial concepts in your approach. Do not take it for granted that they understand your techniques so be sure to communicate this effectively and clearly.

Be clear about responsibilities. 

From the beginning of a collaborative project, communicate and make clear the responsibilities of each researcher. Sometimes this isn't possible with the ever-changing nature of scientific research, so set up periodic assessments of tasks and responsibilities. Set up timelines and milestones for research results, and regularly assess progress towards meeting those expectations.

Establish guidelines for authorship early on. Manuscript authorship is always a delicate topic in science and it can make or break a career. That's why it is important to tackle this early and discuss the expected author list. Establish a framework for who is first author and last author. Furthermore, don't forget to establish the criteria for middle authorship, as this is more ambiguous. What does a researcher have to perform to become an author? Some groups work on the premise that intellectual contribution warrants authorship, others require an actual experimental result, data interpretation, or written contribution to warrant authorship. Depending on the final publishable results, the manuscript may not have the authors you expected, but a basic framework will help when the inevitable time comes to determine authorship and author order.

Share materials early and often. In the course of a collaboration, it is likely that tasks will be repeated. Your collaborator will appreciate if you have already done the task and you can send along your product. For example, if you know your collaborator needs to clone a mutant gene that you've already cloned, send it along to save their time and effort. If you've prepared a nice figure for a presentation, send it along to your collaborator who may use it in a presentation of their own. While this may sound trivial, in the long run, research funds and precious time can be significantly affected if multiple labs have to reinvent the wheel.

Introduce each other to other collaborators, experts and contacts. Chances are, you don't know every expert or company in your field and you may want access to your collaborator's contacts. Conversely, you may have a contact in the field that may be of assistance to your collaborator. Introduce and put your collaborators in contact with each other and your project will grow in scope and gain vital expertise.

I spend a considerable amount of brain power thinking about my productivity level. Come to think of it, many of us think a lot about this, directly or indirectly. We have good days and bad days at work, days when it seems we are getting a lot done, and other days when it seems like we've accomplished nothing. We all talk to our friends and colleagues and wonder if we are getting enough sleep, maybe we should drink some more coffee, maybe we should get more exercise, is it the weather? We all wonder how to get ourselves to our 'best'.

Personally, I have good days and bad days at work and I really want to know why. What did I do to or what frame of mind was I in when I was truly productive, and can I repeat that? What did I do when I was totally wasting my time and can I avoid those things going forward?

Particularly when it comes to scientific research, I think momentum is the key to being productive. Anyone who has worked as a researcher knows that our accomplishments happen in fits and starts; a kind of 'punctuated equilibrium', to borrow a term from evolutionary biology. This means there are long stretches of time during our graduate, postgraduate or professional phases of our research careers when seemingly 'nothing is going on' (or maybe more aptly put, nothing is working). And then there are short bursts of intense progress, when we are faced with a meeting with our supervisor, or deadlines for graduating, or preparation for meetings with collaborators, when we finally breakthrough the barriers that were holding us back, when the experiment we were struggling with for so long finally begins to yield results. That’s when we have momentum.

The question I wonder about is does research have to be this way? Is there something we can do, in our mindset, our preparation, our focus that can move us away from such a disjointed arc of productivity and hold on to that momentum for longer and longer?

Subconscious time.

Not everyone will have the same experiences and therefore may not be able to take the same approach, but for me, I know that my subconscious needs time to 'digest' an upcoming task or project before I can fully devote myself to it. I need to think about an experiment or a paper that I need to write, or a presentation I need to give, before jumping in and doing the work. One could consider this 'dead time' in terms of actual research progress, since after all, nothing is actually being produced. Or, I could consider this essential preparation before I can start generating momentum and produce the necessary work. These are what feel like those 'bad days' at work when nothing gets done and used to frustrate me in my training, but in reality, I now accept they are necessary for me. And so, I can harness this observation going forward and accept that I will not always have momentum at work.

I know that during this preparation time, I need to minimize distractions in the form of other projects, discussions with lab colleagues or supervisors, email checking, even social considerations in my private life. Since my experience tells me I did this consciously or not in my past, this is another actionable piece of advice going forward, where I can purposely set out to reduce distracting considerations in my life before I can tackle the task at hand.

Competition can help.

I also realize that large projects often intimidate me. For example, I am in the process of writing a research paper based on a large set of results and dealing with some complex models of the evolution of enzyme function. It's not an easy topic and I put off seriously thinking about the paper for a long time, because I can admit I was intimidated by how much work I had to do. And then, external considerations arose (we found out another group is working on similar enzymes and could 'scoop' us), so I finally got down to do the task. This forced my brain to focus and engage in that process I described above. I was forced to put other projects out of my mind and focus on this project. Once I did that, this lead to some “eureka” moments when I finally began to understand what I was avoiding for so long: I finally began to understand what the research was 'telling me' and I could finally put together a working theory to explain the data. Before I knew it, momentum was on my side...and it felt exhilarating. This feeling of euphoria of things finally “making sense” and “stuff getting done” was powerful enough to gave me the drive and energy to make excellent progress. The work became self-reinforcing, where making good progress on one section of the paper made me feel a sense of accomplishment that buoyed me to tackle the next section.

Of course, the fear of competition was the catalyst that lead me to focus and get over my feeling of intimidation. I don't know how to replace this in the future and I would prefer not to have the fear of 'getting scooped' drive my productivity. Then again, I know that in many aspects of life, competitive forces are what drives progress. And I know that this experience will stay in my mind, which has value, and I hope that it will provide me with the drive to break out of that punctuated equilibrium model of research progress. Maybe next time I won’t put off those intimidating projects.

Planning and organization is a good way to generate momentum.

Another factor that my experience has told me is necessary to gain and keep momentum is planning and organization. It's important to plan a week or two’s activities in the lab in advance and then act on them. Coming up with a plan needs to be well-thought out in advance (more of that 'dead time'), and I have learned again and again that this is how my brain works. I also know that when I am able to cross off the tasks on my to do list, I gain a sense of accomplishment that gives me momentum. As well, completing tasks opens up further possibilities for future work, and personally I feel that having a longer plan and vision of what comes next also helps me to organize and prepare for future progress.

Realizing research is random.

While in this blog I discussed how I've understood my psychology enough that I can prepare for future roadblocks in progress, my experience has also taught me that research really is random and unpredictable. Thee are many reasons for this. Scientists never fully understand the systems we are experimenting with, we don’t have the ability to control all variables in our experiments, and in biological research, we must accept life is adaptable...and amazingly complex. And so, I have come to expect and actually look forward to times when it seems like nothing is going right, because I know that these are preludes to amazing discoveries.

Working in a busy environment like the research lab involves contact with people you just may not get along with. I'm sure we've all experienced that in our careers, where you are forced to sit beside, share a bench with, or interact with people that you just aren't compatible with.

Perhaps the most typical conflict that arises in labs is differing expectations for cleanliness at the bench or at our desks. I have experienced this in every lab I have worked in: people not cleaning up their glassware after an experiment, not cleaning up after themselves in a communal lab area, or leaving their flasks, beakers or tubes in the sink. I even used to take these out of the sink and place them squarely on the suspected offender's lab bench.

Another common conflict is noise level. Especially in this era of ubiquitous smartphones, beeps and blips are commonplace and we all have phones that make these noises, but nonetheless they can interrupt people at the lab concentrating on their work.

In my experience, there often isn't a "protocol" in place for noise or cleanliness in place in labs, where expectations are clearly communicated and consequences established. For example, academic supervisors rarely have the time for (or caring) to come into the lab and check on how loud it is. They are busy and have their own duties. And I haven't heard of "penalties" or consequences for being messy in an academic lab.

Another complication is that I think scientists are often passive-aggressive. Think about it: how often have you seen an argument in the lab over cleanliness? It just doesn't happen. Conversely, how often have you seen nasty hand-written signs taped beside the communal lab sink? This happens all the time.

So, here clearly there is a problem in need of a solution. If you can't get along with someone you work with in the lab, what should you do?

Communicate, communicate, communicate.

I am guilty of this as much as anyone else. Sometimes when I have an issue with someone I work with, I hide it, for fear of initiating a confrontation or an awkward discussion. This only lets the frustration build inside and thus makes the problem harder to address.

Honesty is usually the best policy, so I think that the best tactic is addressing the problem sooner rather than later, respectfully and directly. If you have a problem with cleanliness, politely ask your co-worker to clean up after themselves. Maybe they intended to but got side-tracked by something or just forgot. If you have a problem with noise level, politely point out to your co-worker they are being loud. They might not even be aware of it.

Miscommunication happens.

Avoid those nasty signs.

Let's be honest--those little signs with nasty messages are childish. Yes, I have been tempted to use them when I am at my most angry, but I have learned to talk myself out of them. Usually people recognize handwriting and if you get caught you just look foolish and incapable of standing up for yourself.

This speaks to the larger issue of being passive-aggressive. If you communicate your issues early, clearly and politely, you will take away any fuel that your mind will have to be passive-aggressive.

Be considerate.

We all have stresses in our lives and sometimes these stresses manifest themselves at the lab. If we have something on our mind, we may not be aware of the impact of our actions on others that work around us. I know I've experienced this in my career, where I had a problem with a co-worker and I later found out that they were going through a tough time in their life, so I became more sympathetic of their behaviors. Make sure you are considerate when you raise any issues with your co-workers and try to put yourself in their shoes.

It's also helpful to be considerate of common personality traits that scientists show. I don't like painting people with the same brush, or judging people until getting to know them, but I've noticed a trend with scientists that I've worked with over the years. They are shy, they don't like confrontations, and they sometimes do not know how to handle conflicts or disagreements. Why am I bringing this up in this blog? I wanted to encourage you to consider that any disruptive behavior your co-workers at the lab are engaging in may not be "on purpose". They just might not know the impact of their actions. I am still encouraging you to confront your lab-mates if you have a problem, but make sure you consider that whatever they may be doing to disrupt your work might not be intentional.

When to bring in your supervisor?

Nobody wants to bring up an issue with their supervisor, or have their supervisor confront them about an issue someone else in the lab brought up. It's awkward all around and we are all adults. Try to address the problem between the two of you, and away from the lab environment. Ask your co-worker to step outside into the hallway or outside of your lab building to have a chat; don't cause a scene in front of the entire lab.

If you can't address the problem yourselves, then and only then bring up the subject to your supervisor. Make sure you have a legitimate and professional complaint; your supervisor surely won't sympathize if you just don't like their choice of food, for example. You need to be sure that the problem you have is something that you can't fix yourself and is something that legitimately affects your productivity. Only then should you expect and ask your supervisor to intervene.

At some point its time to bring in management support..hopefully not like this guy.

Irreconcilable personality types?

Even after trying the techniques I mentioned in this blog, you might find that your co-worker is just totally incompatible with you.

What do you do in this case? Unfortunately... not much. You can try to find somewhere else to work, if you work in an environment large enough to allow for it. You can ask someone in the lab to mediate any disputes. You can try to mind your own business and work separately from them. However, it's vital to keep interactions professional and collegial; chances are you cannot avoid collaborating with your lab-mate and you will certainly be around them at lab meetings or retreats. Swallow your pride and your emotions about the other person. Your career is much more important than any personality clashes at work.

It's so easy to procrastinate. I even procrastinated writing this blog. I started writing it and then multiple times I just stopped and did something else.

There are aspects of the work of being a research scientist that makes it easy to procrastinate. After all, the next task in the lab is often not obvious and takes time to identify and plan. Certainly, in the training stage of our careers, being in graduate school and working as a postdoctoral fellow requires self-motivation; nobody is forcing you to perform another experiment. You're in it for your own advancement and often supervisors are hands off. So it's easy to just... not work.

Compounding these intrinsic factors of being a scientist are extrinsic factors such as becoming distracted with smartphones, social media and the Internet at our fingertips. The Internet has been described as a black hole for our brains and I know exactly what this means when I get started following links upon links.

And so, one wonders, how does anyone in the working world get anything done? How do we defeat the ease with which we can lose focus and lapse into hours of watching cat videos and Angry Birds?

In this blog I will share of the concepts I keep in my mind to prevent me from procrastinating (in theory), and strategies to rescue me from procrastination. Hopefully this will be helpful to you in identifying some of the strategies you could employ in your research careers.

Recognizing Why Your Procrastinate

As in most avenues of life when we want to take control of a situation, the first step is identifying the source of the problem: identify what are the triggers for your procrastination. Are you procrastinating for a specific reason? Is it repetitive? Do you slack off with regularity at certain times during the day, or certain days of the week? Are there certain types of tasks that you tend to avoid doing?

There is always a cause to our procrastination and it is important to identify those that apply to you.

Are you organized? Being a scientist involves many concurrent tasks, like running experiments, running simulations, reading literature, writing papers, attending meetings and conferences, or the myriad other activities we do as scientists. So it's easy to lose to become disorganized and leave our notes thrown around our desks. Also, because experiments and projects take many days to complete, we can lose focus. Or, we can get lost in the minutiae of the technicalities of performing our science that we lose sight of the bigger picture.

To me the easiest way to organize myself is to complete a task and organize my notes and materials related to that task right away. Or if I think of something I need to do, I do it right away instead of shunting it aside to the ever-growing "to do list". I also organize my time as best as I can. I find it convenient to think of our schedule in blocks of weeks and I set goals for each week, at least a few days in advance.

I take time at least once a week to step back from what I was doing that week and put it into prospective of my overall role in the lab and my set of projects. Did the week's activities get me closer to answering a scientific question? Did it get me closer to publishing? The answers to these questions will help me organize the following week?s activities.

I use a program to organize my projects and schedule. I update my notes within that program constantly and immediately. Find whatever method works for you to organize your time and to organize the bigger picture of your career.

Have You Set an Overall Direction for Your Work?

As I mentioned in my introduction, often in science we set our own directions and provide our own motivations. But certainly our supervisors play a role; your work must fit into the overall direction of the lab. Therefore, the direction and overall goal of your research is molded in collaboration with your supervisor. However, that's not to say that all supervisors do a good job of this, and you may find yourself lost or unsure of what to do next in your work. Then you start procrastinating and avoiding being productive.

It's important to regularly refresh the goals and direction of your work. It's important to touch base with your supervisor or colleagues involved in your work and set goals and milestones. Communicate regularly and don't let problems fester. I find that having clear milestones for a project help me from procrastinating, or at least it takes away the trigger for procrastinating based on being unclear of the direction of my work.

Are You Technically Prepared to do the Work - Do You Know What Comes Next?

Sometimes we just do not have the knowledge of our fields well enough to be able to understand what to do next in our work. This clearly will lead to floundering and inefficient use of your time. So the easy answer to this trigger for procrastinating is to make sure you are up to speed with the literature and methods employed in your field, and make sure you communicate with your colleagues if you are unsure of what comes next in your work.

Are You Happy in Your Work? Are You Bored or Insufficiently Challenged?

The last, but certainly not the least important, trigger for procrastination that I wanted to point out here is emotional. If we aren't happy with our work, we will find any excuse not to do it, including spending hours wasting time. If we aren't challenged or stimulated, again, we will not work hard.

Being aware of your emotional state is necessary before you can address it and make some positive changes. Some of these changes may include changing your research project, trying new techniques, taking some time off, talking to your supervisor and colleagues and asking for new challenges, or finding a new way to approach your research question. Fundamentally, everyone has a different level of emotional interest or attachment to their work, but it is absolutely necessary to be satisfied with your work to be able to meet your maximum potential and productivity.

Recasting Procrastination as "Costs"

Just as a perfect vision of capitalism is supposed to work, in my life I have found that when I become aware of the costs of an activity (or inactivity), my habits change to reduce those costs. We can apply this way of thought to fixing procrastination.

We can think of the "opportunity cost" in procrastinating, where the time and effort spent on one activity, while having the benefit of advancing that activity, can also be considered a cost in that it takes time and effort away from spending on another activity. Practically speaking, every hour you spend trying to "zero" your inbox (which inevitably does not last long if you are anything like me), is one hour that is forever lost from performing an experiment in the lab or reading a paper. Therefore, it becomes critical to always consider whether you are making best use of your time, because that time cannot then be applied to another task.

It's also helpful to keep in mind other consequences of putting off tasks. Often tasks that are put off from being completed become harder to complete the longer they are avoided. We becoming increasingly stressed if we know we are avoiding important work, which makes it more difficult to get into the proper mindset to actually perform that work. In research science, there is the ever-present fear of "being scooped", and of course if we procrastinate we increase the odds of a competing researcher completing the work and receiving the credit before us.

The flip side of thinking about "costs" are the "benefits" of addressing procrastination. When we work hard and actually get things done, this unlocks so many benefits. These can include opening up more time and flexibility for future work, getting closer to the next step in our career progression or getting closer to a publication, feeling less stressed about avoiding work, and gaining a sense of accomplishment.

Addressing Procrastination Through Baby Steps that Lead to Balance

Having said all of this, we all need breaks and diversions from our regular work routines, and even I have advocated diversifying your activities in and away from research. I advocate finding a balance between work and play.

As well, you don't have to "fix" your procrastination issues all at once. Make simple goals like cutting down your "procrastination time" by 50% over the course of one week, and then another 50% over a second week. Accept that identifying the source of your slacking and making changes in your work habits may tack time.

Organize your schedule into blocks of "work" and "play" time, and then follow through with that plan and sticking to your structure. For example, you could say I will solidly work in the lab from 9 until 12, have a 30 minute lunch break, work solidly until 3 pm, have a short break, and then work solidly again until 6 pm. To me, this sets my mind at ease that I can focus on the task at hand rather than stress about what I should do, and I also am comfortable knowing that I will have relief breaks spaced throughout the day.

Prioritize tasks - accept that there are only so many hours in a day and you cannot do everything, so make best use of your time by tackling the most important tasks first.

Thinking of Negative Versus Positive Momentum

Finally, I wanted to discuss the role of momentum in productivity. Fundamentally, fighting procrastination is a fight against negative momentum. It is much easier to not do something than it is to actually doing it. So constantly avoiding doing tasks provides a momentum, in a negative sense as this is a momentum we do not want, and therefore the more we procrastinate, the more "negative" momentum we build. It only becomes harder to reverse the trend the longer we procrastinate and pile on to our "to do list". This is a tradeoff for short-term gain at the cost of long-term pain.

Luckily, I find that tackling tasks before my "to do list" grows because of too much procrastinating is a powerful source of positive momentum. It feels good to get things done. This gives me energy to get even more stuff done. I harness this good feeling and build on it to turn around the negative momentum and build momentum towards the positive effects on my career that I listed earlier.

Most of us that work in the biological sciences have seen pretty pictures of enzymes on journal covers or decorating a presenter’s seminar slides. It’s easy to assume that the purpose of studying the three-dimensional structure of a protein is solely to create these pretty pictures. We all know proteins are comprised of helices and strands, but beyond that, how many life scientists truly understand protein structure?

The superficial perspective most life scientists have of protein structure masks the central importance that the three-dimensional conformation of enzymes plays in life itself. In this blog, I will briefly illustrate how an understanding of basic protein biochemistry and structure can play an important role in the work of any life scientist.

What a protein structure image really tells you

The specific tasks performed by proteins are enabled by the specific three-dimension fold. This is the central tenet of structural biology: fold = function. The information portrayed in those fancy structure pictures is actually conveying this information.

The most obvious illustration of fold enabling function are molecular machines. A recent blog at this site illustrated some examples of how protein structures mimics machines manufactured by humans (actually this is the other way around as these proteins existed for ages longer than human machines!). The Protein Databank has an amazing poster that shows various molecular machines.

One of my favourite molecular machines is DNA polymerase. The protein is shaped like a hand that is able to grip its cognate DNA and slide in a processive way, synthesizing a second copy of the genome. Another amazing structure is ATP synthase. The complex looks like a mini turbine, with a spinning top and a membrane-spanning pore. The complex is able to harness the movement of protons through the pore down their concentration gradient, and coupling this to twisting the 'turbine', which allows phosphorylation of ADP to form the energy carrier ATP.

Without 3D information, these functional insights would be impossible.

Crystal structure of DNA polymerase bound to a short double helix of DNA

How protein structure can help you in your research

Every kind of biologist or biochemist can make use of 3D structural information.

Here are some examples:

*molecular biologists: frequently these scientists are interested in genome->phenotype relationships, as revealed by knock-out studies, for example. The connection is protein function. Having 3D structural information can yield insights into what your favourite gene actually does.

Site-directed mutagenesis is often performed for more detailed functional understanding. But, how do you know what mutation to make? Inspection of protein sequence alignments can identify conserved residues that are actually buried in the core of the protein; mutation of these results in misfolding of protein, which is a“non-specific dominant negative effect. A proper mutation to affect function would be an active site residue (a specific mutation). 3D structure is critical for identifying these functionally relevant residues.

Another useful feature of 3D protein structure is the electrostatic surface. This can reveal active sites (for example, DNA/RNA binding proteins have basic/positively charged patches to enable interaction with negatively charged nucleic acid). Often 3D structures contain ions and metals; these often correlate with active sites even when substrate is not present in the structure. For example, phosphate ions often reveal binding sites for ATP or other phosphate-containing cofactors.

*immunologists: the antibody-antigen interaction is structure-dependent: an antigen must have a surface-exposed epitope. 3D structural information allows identification, understanding and optimization of antigens. As well, the sequence conservation of epitopes across related proteins plays a role in whether your antibody is polyclonal (recognizes conserved structural features in the epitope), or monoclonal (recognizes unique features).

*evolutionary biologists: it is well established that 3D structure is more conserved than protein sequence, thus structural information can add context to protein sequence and alignments by providing residue-specific functional roles. Reconstruction of the evolutionary history of proteins is more accurate and functionally relevant with structure-based multiple sequence alignment.

*genome biologists: as 3D structure is the best read-out for function, functional assignment in genome reconstruction can be assisted by structural homology. Usually genomes are annotated by simple sequence comparisons, but the false-positive rate can be improved through structural comparisons.

*medicinal chemists and drug discovery professionals: 3D structure is absolutely crucial for rationally designing and optimizing compounds for drug discovery. Binding of small molecule inhibitors to active sites can be explained using 3D structure and features of the active site can be exploited to enhance inhibition.

Crystal structure of a tyrosine kinase implicated in cancer (blue) bound to an inhibitory drug (red)

Ok you convinced me, how do I get a structure of my protein?

I'm glad I convinced you. The best way is to arrange a collaboration with a lab that performs one of the two main structure determination methods (x-ray crystallography or nuclear magnetic resonance/NMR). Having a relationship between a structural biology and a molecular biology lab is ideal.

Originally posted at 1Degreebio Blog

As academic scientists we spend most of our time generating and analyzing research data. The essential task after generating research results is their dissemination, typically in research papers. Writing papers is a part of the scientific process that I've heard many of my friends and colleagues complain about. There are different reasons for why they do not enjoy writing: some say writing is not their strong suit, others do not enjoy being away from the bench.

Indeed, writing is difficult. I'm not the type of scientist to dislike writing (or I wouldn't be blogging this), but certainly, I find writing challenging when there are other responsibilities competing for my time and attention. Something that I can agree with friends and colleagues of mine that do not enjoy writing is this: it is often difficult to focus on writing in the lab. There is always so much going on in labs: supervisor dropping by to talk or assigning tasks, colleagues chatting with each other, or chatting on the phone, text message notifications on people's phones, music playing, equipment whirring and rumbling, the endless battle to zero your inbox, and so many more visual distractions.

Over the years, I've learned techniques and strategies for maximizing my writing efficiency, although I wish I was totally immune from all distractions. What is it that I do to minimize distractions and keep my focus on the important task of writing?

Mentally Preparing Yourself

Putting complex thoughts down to paper/your laptop screen is not easy. It takes a lot of mental energy to synthesize research observations and related research from the literature into a product that is worthy of publication. I need to give myself a few days of mental preparation before I settle into the task of writing; these few days are spent doing my regular research duties and closing loose ends that I think may distract me once the writing begins. I don't understand why this works for me. Perhaps my subconscious is preparing the necessary pathways that I will rely on when I get down to writing. And certainly typing up loose ends ensures I have the minimum possible amount of work to do while I am settling down to writing. In sum, I find mental preparation before writing essential for success.

Organizing Your Time and Setting Realistic Expectations for Productivity

I've experienced this time and time again: after setting the table and mentally preparing to write, I am ready to tackle the job and I have a healthy level of motivation and energy. But, inevitably, after a few days my motivation level drops and distractions accumulate. If things go poorly I may even I stop writing and instead take on other work in the lab. I have heard from friends and colleagues about similar experiences.

What I've learned from this is that you need to anticipate this experience in advance and be prepared for loss of motivation and stumbling blocks. It's important to realize that this ok and important to prepare for this by setting realistic expectations and achievable goals. When you have a high level of motivation and energy, you may set lofty goals for how hard you plan to work, assuming that motivation level will be maintained - but the most productive of us cannot sustain hard work forever. I think it's important to set up a writing schedule and set benchmarks for your progress that allows for breaks, distractions and diversions. In the end, this will be a work schedule that is sustainable.

Setting your expectations for productivity requires experience through trial and error. I have learned that the early stages of my writing projects involve a brainstorming phase where I write down random thoughts and ideas in nearly a random fashion during the day. Sometimes I'm on my way home from the lab and I have an idea for the paper, other times I'm working at the lab and come up with other ideas. Over time, I piece together my ideas and pieces of paragraphs into a more refined product. Through this trial and error, I accept that this is how my brain works and I plan my projects accordingly.

Don't Forget Ergonomics

The more I write over the years, the more I appreciate proper ergonomics. This refers to all those physical elements your mind and body engage with to actually perform work, including the device you are writing on, your chair, your desk, and the lighting. In this age of laptops, tablets, phones and computers of all shapes and sizes, there are many choices for different writing styles. I think it's easy to forget that the physical environment around us when we write affects our ability to focus; if you?re thinking about a bad back you won?t be thinking about your writing.

Music - A Double-Sided Coin

It's well known that music increases productivity and improves the mood. So it's pretty obvious that cranking on iTunes and putting in your earphones is a good way to aid focus.

What I wanted to point out here is that there are downsides to listening to music at the lab that not everyone is aware of. Wearing earphones in the lab sends out signals to others to "leave me alone" or "I don't want to talk to you". Admittedly, in this blog I describe techniques for focusing and to do this involves excluding others, but it is a delicate thing when you are at the lab. It's important to realize that listening to music at the lab excludes yourself from important interactions (at best), and at worst could cause problems in staying abreast of important developments in the lab. For example, if you have your music on when your supervisor is discussing important lab issues and you miss it, that's a problem.

My advice would be to politely make it clear to your colleagues and supervisor that you are focusing on writing but are open to important interactions. Maybe once in a while take off your music and interact with your co-workers so any social awkwardness is relieved and so you can stay engaged in the lab dynamics.

Don't Be at the Lab

This might not be possible in all labs, but a very easy way to minimize distractions and therefore help you focus on writing is to physically remove yourself from those distractions. As well, for many people, it helps to change up your work environment; I find that doing the exact same writing or reading task at my lab computer versus on my laptop at a coffee shop can feel very different. Assuming you can get away and your supervisor approves, find somewhere where the environment best suits what you require to focus on writing.

Telling Other People that You are Writing

One of the major distractions we experience when writing is being interrupted by others. I am certainly not advocating ignoring your colleagues and certainly not your supervisor! What I am advocating is that a relatively easy technique to reduce interruptions is to politely inform your colleagues that you are writing and trying to focus on the task. You don't even have to tell them not to interrupt you--being clear that you are focused on your writing should be enough to get your point across.

You could also set up times during the day when you are accessible to others. For example, you could find a library to do your writing for a few hours a day, and in the remaining hours you could do your writing in the lab where you let others know that you are available to interacting with others.

Often your colleagues will be interrupting you to ask for help or for assistance in research duties. This depends on your lab dynamic and your responsibilities, but for me I find that my days can be consumed with collaborative tasks with lab members unless I deliberately set aside times to focus on my writing. It's important to balance engaging others and having respectful boundaries around your time.

Recently I wrote a blog about the personality traits of successful scientists. I wrote that from my experience and from what I've observed of many fellow scientists and colleagues, two of the most important traits are critical and analytical thought.

I later realized a better term to describe these two most important traits is "skepticism". Recently I took part in a meeting which was totally filled with a lack of skepticism but absolutely chock full of the opposite: speculation. I felt so frustrated and I just had to devote a new blog entry to it. I don't want anyone to develop as a scientist that relies more on speculation, hand-waving and outright dreaming more than they rely on cold, hard facts, which are truly the only things we have to go by in science.

Science is not supposed to work in such a way that you can take one small piece of data and jump to an unwarranted conclusion, and then jump to another, and then another... so much that the explanation for the original piece of data is so unrelated to actual fact that it is almost laughable. As a society we would go nowhere if science... or law, or politics, or interpersonal relationships operated in this way.

Yet I have seen this time and time again in my experience and it is outright wrong and downright frustrating.

I understand there are many reasons and temptations to take our research results and get carried away with them. These include:

The desire to come up with "grand theory of everything": it is easy to be tempted to take modest research results and get carried away into thinking this explains our entire field. For example, the identification of a single gene whose genetic abnormality results in a disease phenotype in mice is common, and then inferring this result to be necessary and sufficient to cause the similar human disease is also unfortunately common and ignores the many differences between species.

The absolute necessity to publish: we all need and want papers. So we are easily tempted to take our modest research results and want to publish it and to assume it is publishable... but to publish in science (at least in a quality journal) requires a significant array of results, should be logically consistent and complete, and should tell a story.

The age of "omics": especially with computer-aided science, and with the vast collection of publicly-available scientific literature, it is easy to conduct science from our desks. For example, we can try to predict the function of a gene of interest, and then find literature on this function, and then make all kind of speculations about what our gene is doing. I used to do this a lot. But at the end of the day, without generating testable hypotheses, and then actually testing this, this easy kind of speculation means nothing.

We all want to impress our supervisors, colleagues and the scientific community. We face these pressures every day from our supervisors and we are expected to come up with results. However, hurrying your work, being sloppy, reading into your results too much or speculating too much, while easy to do and apparently impresses your colleagues, will always catch up to you in the end.

We all want to advance our careers.

Maybe we don't understand the underlying science, the next experimental steps necessary to prove our theory correct, or we are too lazy to do the necessary follow-up work.

Its true that we face all of these pressures every day as researchers. But to lose sight of the extent to which one research result can explain a phenomenon, or to concoct a fanciful story that "sounds amazing", sounds logical or obvious, is to lose the core of what it is to do science.

Maybe it's hard to admit we are wrong, that we don't know enough, that we aren't ready to publish, that we have to work more or work harder. It's human nature to think ahead and find the path of least resistance. I don't have the answers. But what I do know is that nearly every day I am forced to re-think my hypotheses in the face of "negative" results--and it has always served me well in leading me closer to the truth, and papers, and career advancement, and all those temptations I listed above.

Speculating in science is useful only to spur the next round of experimentation, and if that experimentation fails to support the underlying hypothesis, that hypothesis must be thrown out the window and new one developed. Without operating this way, we are not scientists but only pretenders.