#authorshipethics

I sit in my ethics class and cringe at how my colleagues in research are stingily deciding who deserves authorship. It feels capitalistic, and they seem bothered that any amount of recognition should trickle down. “Does having more authors on a paper devalue the work,” I ask. “Yes, it dilutes it,” is someone’s answer. What about someone who contributes intellectual direction – no! A technician who is hired to do a job and if they do it with the speed and efficiency that only an expert can boast, but you deem unworthy – “no!” I am really hoping that is just how some of them feel though. It’s so weird to think how people equate the value of their science to authorships and a few pieces of paper (more recently some pixels on a screen). I hate this system… the longer I’m on this earth, the more I find out that I hate so many systems besides the ones I learned about in my hard science lectures. I want so badly for science to be for the sake of science… was it ever that way? This is why we are all in therapy – months, years, decades of 60 hour weeks and lost sleep reduced down to an impact factor for a couple of pages. No amount of authors could ever erase any second of work that someone did to answer a question that they truly thought was worth it.  However, somehow we can envision it being diluted and we sit debating who deserves to have a name, because until you get that authorship, you don’t really exist to these people.

I have sat there and watched everyone around me do experiments, and read papers, and analyze data competently. While I ordered supplies, or made reagents, or cleaned rooms and fridges and freezers to standards that might help make others’ experiments go smoothly. I called maintenance, I worked on training regimens, wrote SOPs and safety plans, inventoried, moved decades worth of undone experiments from failing freezers as my hands were burned with -80°C ice and metal. I loved it though, even as I watched all the things around me move forward, as each needy interruption kept me staying still.

And my worth and how I could never consider myself a scientist during this time was largely based on this notion built on a foundation where I was being invested in monetarily, not intellectually. Truly though, I was a lucky one with one of the most encouraging bosses that I think may exist in this field now. She made sure that I had tastes of projects that I could take ownership of and develop my palate with. Most of the morsels didn’t take, but when I sunk my teeth into a project that actually ended up consuming me, everything changed. I couldn’t just watch and support as everything and everyone moved forward without me.  But that blissful fulfillment of being relied on doesn’t follow you forward sometimes.

I am “moving forward” now, but I look back and miss that useful feeling; it felt selfless and rewarding the way I remember it now. I look back at the times I cried in storage rooms because some privileged fool belittled my expertise or acted as though I owed them anything. I understand completely how my new lab’s manager feels when she says she wants to do science but is stuck in administrative hell… there has to be license plate holder for that. I hate taking projects away from her because she has no time or freedom to explore these compelling questions at the bench. Now I am the interrupter and resource user, I learn and read and analyze too now. If this is the struggle that they lord over those at the bottom, I am not impressed.