The grad school blues

A large portion of grad school is reading. Lots and lots of reading and doing what you can to synthesize the information into a whole and then do something with it. This is much more difficult than it may seem for a plethora of reasons, but when it really comes down to many areas of the literature the larger picture makes sense. Things are somewhat ordered.

This is not the case with the literature I’m reading for my project. The area I study seems to be nothing but a clusterfuck of randomness. However, the data is rarely presented this way which makes reading the papers that much more difficult. For instance, I just read a paper that had a very nice looking bar graph, but after reading the text I realized the data for that figure was only from ~15% of the cells they recorded from. I’m not saying that making the comparison they did wasn’t valid, it was, but it was also somewhat misleading since you kind of had to dig for the rest of the story.

This is really bringing something to light that I wish more people in my lab (really, just some of the higher ups) would recognize: the nucleus we study IS NOT HOMOGENOUS. All the cells share some basic characteristics, but that does not mean we can treat them as a homogenous group like we do. I’ve been fighting this stance since the beginning due to the literature and my own findings and while I seem to have convinced my peers the higher-ups still don’t apparently see it that way.

Science can be frustrating.

One more week

Then I’ll be done with my qualifier and things will be roughly back to normal. Unless I fail, which given my program is a very possible outcome, then I’ll have another month or two of hell.

Thankfully, another grad student and I have been talking about a nice future co-venture that, if it works, will end up being a very important part of both our theses. God, I hope it works…

When work is life

I get a little depressed.

All I do anymore is read textbooks, papers, and everything else I can get my hands on to prep for a single fucking exam. Oh, and what little time I take off I spend thinking about how I can approach my thesis project.

My life is so boring. I need a hobby outside of research.

Neurological disease: a complicated beast

Earlier today I was doing a little Googling looking for information that I plan to use for a thesis project when I came across a blog about the science of Parkinson’s Disease. At first I was really excited since I rarely see blogs about the science of specific diseases and I feel those are very much needed in today’s serious state of scientific misinformation. After the initial surprise of its existence, I actually made the mistake of reading the blog. I was not only disappointed, but saddened as well.

My disappointment was less about the apparent state of research and more about how research (and researchers) is presented to patients and their families. How and why biological research is conducted is largely a mystery to the vast majority of even the most educated people. What disappointed and distressed me most was how research was perceived by this patient. It was of the “why aren’t you doing this?” mentality that I find is quite pervasive in online patient communities of all diseases I’ve come across. This idea that we researchers are not really interested in certain questions about disease progression and pathology are partially correct but largely misguided, and often perpetuated by the perceived lack of progress in curing the disease in question.

It is true that scientists often halt seemingly promising lines of research much to the dismay of patients suffering from a debilitating disease, but it is not because we do not care. Instead, we do it because it makes sense scientifically and financially. If it doesn’t seem to be a fruitful endeavor then there is no point to keep wasting very valuable time and money pursuing it. There is also a simple reason we do not let patients dictate our research direction: they do not understand the science behind their disease. This is not an insult, but a simple fact. These are very complicated matters that take years of training in order to just begin to understand, and to expect a patient with little knowledge of biology to truly understand the research is unreasonable. That is why we don’t expect them to understand the underlying pathophysiology of their disease. However, patients oftentimes feel they understand more than they do (a little bit of knowledge…) due to their intimate knowledge of their disease. I cannot blame them, but I do wish they would have a little humility and acknowledge that there are plenty of professionals out there who have studied their disease for years in order to understand and, hopefully one day, conquer it.

Though most of us scientists got into research due to simple human curiosity it does not mean we don’t care about the real world implications of our work. We’re working hard not just for ourselves, but also because we know it makes a difference not only in the lives of patients, but also other scientists, and humanity at large.

Overall, I wish the author of the above blog the best in his/her treatment and that this post may help explain a bit of why we do what we do, but I also wish that some of the opinions of the author are changed for the better.