Ich bin Anna - Part II

This is Part II of the series. To read Part I, click here.

Based on several true stories

It’s Saturday evening, and I’m almost done with my work. Cell culture, qPCR and
analysis, maxiprep and sequencing, and planning for next week. I’m puzzling over my qPCR results, which don’t match my hypothesis, when my former classmate Aram calls. He’s doing his PhD in New York. Why are we all doing doctorates anyway? Simple. You don’t get a job without the title. Our degree alone apparently doesn’t count, at least that’s what was drilled into us in Germany.

“Anna, hey! How’s Boston? Freezing too?” We start with small talk, but soon get to
the real reason behind his call.

“His data are wrong! The data from my predecessor, the postdoc, they’re wrong! I
swear to you, Anna. Three people have tried to reproduce his results, and nothing.
This protein doesn’t react. And the worst thing is, I realized it after just a few months. But I have to keep working on the project because it was published in a high-impact journal, and my supervisor refuses to accept it.”

He’s beside himself. Scientific integrity is one of the highest principles for a
researcher. What we publish becomes the foundation for other studies. The idea is
that science, collectively, generates insights that can be turned into medicines and
therapies for humanity. But falsified or polished results have become an increasing
problem. Some researchers break under the system’s pressure and go astray. And
what happens to them? Not much. If a scientist’s name is big enough, things get
quietly overlooked. There’s no neutral authority to monitor scientific publications. And there’s no recognition for so-called negative results, findings that disprove a
hypothesis. Results that show a drug doesn’t actually improve wound healing or that a protein isn’t involved in the unfolded protein response. Those results come from long workdays, discipline, sweat, and heart. But who cares about failure?

In life sciences research, evolution plays roulette. In school and university, talent and effort still roughly correlated with success, i.e. with knowledge and good grades. Knowing your abilities, you could estimate how much work it would take to get a certain result. That correlation collapses completely in biological research. The main determinant is luck. Luck in choosing a project whose hypothesis turns out to be true. Luck that your project matches what funding agencies consider relevant. Luck in having a supervisor who helps you grow. Luck in having a predecessor who was honest about negative results instead of polishing them up. Hard work increases your chances only slightly, mainly by getting you faster to the point where you realize you’re stuck and have to start over elsewhere. What idiocy. Our success barely correlates with performance, yet our desperate response to failure is to work obsessively. Is that really all we can think of? Shouldn’t we expect more from clever minds?

Aram goes on. “At first, I thought I’d done something wrong. A planning mistake, a
technical error, something I’d missed. But when another colleague, working
completely independently, got the same results, I knew the data couldn’t be right.”

Scientists live under constant pressure to perform. Performance is measured by the amount of positive data produced—data so sensational they can be published. That leads scientists, consciously or unconsciously, to seek positive results. The outcome is a daily struggle with one’s own ethics. But there’s no reward when objectivity wins.

These realizations weigh heavily on my talented friend’s shoulders. And on
humanity’s. Luckily, few people know this.

“I’ve lost two years because of it. And you know what kind of years.” I did know.
Years of struggle. With himself, with money, with principles, with job prospects, with the future, with pressure. Aram had a long-distance relationship in Germany. He saw Marie two weeks a year. No more vacation than that. Those were the years he meant.

Anyone aiming for a serious scientific career must, for the sake of their CV, leave
home and spend part of their training in the US, the UK, Switzerland, or Northern
Europe. The goal is to stay methodologically and technologically up to date, and to
build an international network. It’s both a valuable opportunity to experience different countries, cultures, and languages, and an enormous challenge that demands constant flexibility. Countless relationships and families have fallen victim to this unstable lifestyle. Starting over again and again is exhausting and takes courage. Science is not for the faint-hearted.

The video call left me thoughtful, and I’m not ready to go home yet. But I don’t want to stay in the lab either. So I meet up with my friend Dave, who thankfully has nothing to do with science. He’s a programmer. I can code a little myself. I once built a feeding timer for my parents’ endlessly hungry cat so he couldn’t get to his food all the time. The thought of that eight-kilo reddish furball makes me smile.

Dave had been wanting to show me his new office. Now I understand why. His
twenty-person team has a 160-square-metre office in a beautiful red-brick building
overlooking Boston Common. When you enter, lights and music turn on
automatically. We drink gin tonic and Fritz coke, eat kiwis and bananas. All free, paid by the company. The entire lower level is designed for comfort and socialising, equipped with a cinema, pool table, kitchen, two nap rooms, a gaming room, and a rooftop terrace. Everything is modern and tastefully done. “We can use all of it,” he says proudly. “Lunch catering’s covered too. We don’t really have to worry about anything.”

I sit down, stunned, staring at the huge flat screen in front of me. “Work hours are
super easy,” he adds. “Nine to five core time. You can do more if you want, or not,
whatever.” He grins.

I think of my tiny workspace in the lab. The computer is more than twenty years old, so slow it can barely run “modern” programs. We even had to buy our own laptops. Equipment, mouse, screen same story. At least those still work, if you’re patient. “So, what does your company actually do to have that much money? What do you code?” I ask. “You’ve forgotten already, Anna? Entertainment apps for phones. Quiz games with funny colourful birds and fat cats.” “Right,” I say. Somehow, public interest seems far greater in that than in biomedical research. Supply and demand, I guess.