Cool research questions and applied research

As a graduate student of an advisor that likes to socialize and network, I often find myself meeting with various visiting scientists to chat about research. Over the past few weeks, I've met with three such scientists. All of them are incredibly intelligent and do interesting work on genomics and chromosomal evolution in plants.

I had lunch with the first scientist. Each student or post doc chatted a little about our research. When it was my turn, I described my work (genome evolution in an obscure monocot family, Commelinaceae). He said he was going to ask me a mean, perhaps unfair, question. I was game, said OK. After all....why did I spend so much time competing in speech and debate if it wasn't to field unfair questions? He asked why I worked on plants that didn't have an applied research angle. I provided my standard answer about comparative biology offering a unique and useful approach for understanding biological complexity in the realm of plants not altered by humans, blah blah blah. I felt I was pretty articulate for being ill and doped up on cold medicine. He waited a moment, then said he didn't buy it. Basically, no answer would have worked...he didn't think a plant was worth studying unless people could eat it.

The second meeting with a scientist went much the same. Lunch, talk about science. This scientist was just mystified as to why I would choose to work on an obscure group. He accepted the value of empirical research, but didn't seem to grasp the relevance of working on a non-model system.

I just had a meeting with yet another scientist. This was an individual meeting with no other folks present. I must admit I approached the meeting with a moderate amount of trepidation, as I wasn't really geared up on this lovely Monday morning to defend my research again.

I'm pleased to say I was pleasantly surprised. We had a quite excellent discussion about chromosomal evolution, molecular mechanisms of genome restructuring, and emerging areas for research as technology develops and our knowledge base grows. He had not only heard of my group of plants, but used it as a teaching tool when instructing students in cytogenetics and chromosomal evolution. He helped me develop my conceptual framework for chromosomal evolution and the context in which I place different types of chromosomal information and analysis. It was an inspiring, refreshing, and very nice way to spend 45 minutes this morning.

In light of my new-found enthusiasm for cytogenetics, here's a picture of some painted wheat chromosomes I took a few years ago when learning cytogenetic techniques. The blue blobs are wheat chromosomes. The red dots are centromeres, and the green dots are an unknown genome fragment I was testing. Now if I could only get some Commelinaceae cytogenetic pics this pretty...

Internet and e-mail etiquette

The next installment of "Kate is awed by the huge variation in reactions to normal life situations in academia."


I love e-mail. In most situations, I prefer to e-mail rather than call on the telephone, even when a moderately rapid response is desired. I am constantly boggled, however, at the manner in which some people view, interpret, and respond to e-mail. I tend towards informality in e-mail although I strive for clarity and succinctness. However, I am often addressed very formally in regards to my activities in service organizations. I have never been burned by my relative lack of formality, although I know folks that have had quite disastrous encounters via e-mail through no fault of their own (except for a misinterpretation of e-mail language).

On the plane from Mexico City to Dallas this past week, I came across a nice quick list of the top ten rules of e-mail etiquette. As the name of the magazine currently escapes me, I found a comprehensive list of tips for e-mail etiquette online.

Although buried beneath several subheadings a quite a scroll down the page, the hint that startled me the most when I was something along the lines of "Treat an e-mail address like a home phone number." I currently struggle with the concept of how often to e-mail (or CC) certain people in regards to partially relevant topics. This issue becomes even cloudier for me when I start to consider whether a response is needed for a particular message.

I interact with a number of individuals that love to send e-mail. In some ways, I really enjoy being kept in the loop and engaged in the discussion about certain topics being conducted via e-mail. At times, though, this becomes out of control, to the point of completely missing important messages because they are buried between multiple messages about another topic. I believe I'll need to ponder this topic a little more over the next few months...

For future reference, my other favorite rules for e-mail:
(1) Don't send huge attachments.
(2) Learn the difference between "reply" and "reply all"

Duplication

I'm not sure where my sense of morality and ethics originated. I do know that it tends to be as/more strong/stringent as most other people I know. Despite many situations in basic schooling (elementary, middle and high school) when opportunities arose to allow me to cheat at schoolwork, I decided not to follow that easier route. In college, I knew many students that attempted, and sometimes even succeeded, in cheating the system to achieve better grades but I never permitted myself to even consider the possibility (*sidenote*: my lack of cheating at schoolwork had as much to do with academic snobbery, or a feeling of being superior to the need to cheat, as the weak ethical standards it represented *end sidenote*).

My undergraduate university presumably maintained strict standards about cheating and plagiarism, including required ethical conduct statements in all syllabi. Regardless, I knew of no one that experienced class failure or dismissal from the University because of the violation of this statement. However, I was granted the opportunity to learn from several outstanding professors that adhered to strict standards about ethical violations. On one particularly memorable occasion, a professor encountered plagiarism on a relatively unimportant assignment. He delivered a short, well-worded, and vehement lecture condemning the practice and then cancelled class in order for us to "consider the implications of academic dishonesty." While I am not sure how other students in the class viewed his display, I felt relief in knowing people I admire take such cheating seriously.

I remember that professor every time I encounter a case of academic dishonesty. While beginning my graduate education I took a class in ethical conduct of science. Most of the exercises seemed silly, because I had already considered the implications of most examples of dishonesty presented. The most striking revelation from this class was the frequency with which such violations occur. Perhaps because I suffer from the common ailment of most academics in thinking that everyone else maintains a similar mindset to me, I was shocked to discover that there are scientists that have inappropriate relationships with students, falsify data, and maintain less-than-perfect standards in data collection and analysis.

A recent article in Science Magazine documents an interesting study in which plagiarism detection software found a few hundred cases of academic dishonesty in (mostly medical?) journal articles. The main subject of this research article, however, revolved around questionnaires sent to relevant authors and journal editors of both the original articles and presumably "copied" articles. The responses to these queries was quite revealing: responses ranged from outright condemnation of the practice, to tact acceptance, to apologetic remorse.

I have encountered several examples of cheating in the course of my graduate career. My graduate student peers often have undergraduate students attempting to cheat in classes they teach. Conversations with post-doctoral researchers and other graduate students reveal interesting situations of compromised ethical standards at other institutions in which they worked, including inappropriate student/professor relationships (which can have direct effects on the standards to which scientific inquiry is held), questionable data collection/analysis, and stealing scientific ideas, experiments, and data first developed by other researchers (and other related cases of academic blackmail).

More importantly, I have experienced interesting cases that required direct decisions and judgement on my part. I reviewed a journal article that had whole paragraphs copied directly from a previous paper with some of the same authors. At the time, I thought a new graduate student (or technician, or undergraduate) had used a senior scientist's paper as a template to write a new paper and had leaned a little too heavily on the previous author's writing. After reading the Science article, however, I'm starting to wonder if the situation had less to do with an accident and more to do with ignorance and lax standards. Recently, I've also encountered a case related to one of my service activities in which a graduate student may be attempting to pass over another student's work as their own.

The most interesting aspect of this issue is that I have noted so many cases of academic dishonesty directly related to myself and my peers, but that some editors questioned in the Science article admitted to never having faced these difficulties before. Why? I see that there are several options. (1) Academic dishonesty is increasing in frequency. (2) The frequency of such violations remains the same, but technology is allowing them to be detecting more often. (3) Scientists (and other academics) are becoming less adept at hiding academic dishonesty. (4) I am more adept at noting and remembering academic dishonesty.

Perhaps it is a combination of factors. I can only hope that the people with which I interact maintain similar standards of ethical conduct. I know we will not always agree on the relevance and importance of ethics in certain situations; many situations are generally distilled down to esoteric and abstract philosophical notions. However, any situation that could result in a contribution of scientific knowledge demands, in my opinion, only a strict adherence to standards of accuracy and precision in the interpretation of data, and in these cases, a discussion of such standards may be worth the time.

These are some lovely golden raspberries I had to buy the other day as they were on sale at the supermarket. They reminded me of my days working on plant systematics at WKU, as my undergrad advisor was an expert in Rubus, (raspberries and blackberries). So many pretty little berries, all perfectly alike...it is so interesting to me that the collection of data is best done with strict replication, but the writing up and publishing of research results is so flawed when copying from previous authors occurs....