The discussion about my usage of the term “professional scientist” has raised a lot of objections. Mostly I think these have been emotional, and in fact it’s pretty clear what is happening. People are using equivocation to take advantage of the different narrow vs. broad definitions of “professional” and “scientist”.
The narrow definitions restrict the terms to a relatively small subset of individuals. That is, a “professional” does something as their “profession” and is someone who meets a variety of criteria such as academic qualifications, proficiency, doing something for a living, not being in training anymore, etc. (See Wikipedia, and also the first definitions listed in the Oxford and Webster’s dictionaries). Similarly, the strict version of “scientist” would apply to individuals who carry out scientific research and do related things in their particular disciplines (e.g., review papers, publish peer-reviewed papers, gain grants, patent inventions, write formal reports for government or industry employers, etc.) for a living and intend to do so long-term. This would include PIs, obviously, but also industry scientists, government scientists, permanent lab technicians who do original research, etc.
The broad definitions are much more inclusive. Some people have used definitions so broad that almost anyone could qualify. For example, several have said that “a professional is someone who gets paid for something” and a scientist is “anyone engaged in scientific research at any level”. Part-time undergraduate summer students paid to do a project might be “professional scientists” under this definition.
The narrow definitions carry with them a significant amount of prestige. This is because the terms are applied only to individuals who meet the criteria. The broad definitions, which are more or less open to anyone, would not provide any prestige on their own because their criteria are so easy to meet. The bait and switch comes when people use the broad definition to get themselves covered by the term such that they can enjoy the prestige attached to the narrow definition. If either definition were the only one, there would be no objections because either people would recognize that they have not met the criteria (narrow sense only) or they wouldn’t care because it didn’t mean anything (broad sense only).
Ask yourself this: would the grad students who have objected strongly to being excluded from “professional scientist” really care about this if the term only applied to students and never to individuals who currently fall under the narrow definition?
Or how about this: Graduate students, in Canada at least, are paid by two major components of their stipend, the GRA (graduate research assistantship, paid by the advisor) and the GTA (graduate teaching assistantship, paid by the department). Because they are paid to do research, people have argued that they are “professional scientists”. Would there be equal reaction if instead I had called my post “Graduate students are not professional educators”? Would teachers, professors, and others who educate students for a living have a right to differentiate between their careers and what a TA does? Graduate students are also paid to write papers and a thesis. Are they “professional writers”? Would people who earn their living by writing not rightly see a difference?
Here’s another: Most of us have worked a variety of jobs in our lives. Through most of high school, I worked in a restaurant. This was my only source of income. I did it in the summer as well as weekends during the school year. Would anyone here really suggest that I should have considered myself a “professional dishwasher?”. As an undergrad, I worked in a warehouse where I was in charge of shipping. I worked the same hours and made about the same money as people who did this as their main occupation all year. In fact, I had more responsibility than most because I also did invoicing and other office tasks. Was I a “professional warehouse worker”?
Yet another: Imagine a very talented football player gets a full scholarship to play for a college team. He takes classes, but his main passion is football, and he fully intends to go on to the NFL if he can. Is he a “professional football player”? If not, why not? What would a player in the NFL say about whether this counts as being a “professional”? What if the player does not get drafted and instead takes up a different occupation, would he be an ex-professional athlete?
And finally: Let’s say you are pursuing a masters degree in journalism. You write very good articles for the campus paper, and you are paid for some stories that make it into larger newspapers. You fully intend to seek permanent employment as a reporter once you graduate. Are you a “professional journalist”? What would established reporters say?
It comes down to this. If you are planning to go on in science as a long-term career once you finish your studies, and you appreciate the prestige that comes with it, then just be patient because it’s coming soon enough. If you are only doing science temporarily, or you really aren’t confident that you’ll be able to make a career of it, then the prestige you enjoy by calling yourself a “professional scientist” is borrowed and ephemeral. The third option is that you don’t care one way or the other, but then you’re not the one commenting on my blog…
There is no slight intended here. Being a graduate student in science has its own prestige and students deserve a ton of respect for the science that they do. But getting angry with me for using a term in only one sense when they themselves are switching back and forth to their own advantage is not good.
Brian Switek has a paper coming out in Evolution: Education and Outreach that discusses the nonsense surrounding Darwinius, dubbed hyper-hypefully “the link”, and the contribution that blogs played in setting the record straight. Check it out.
If I were to put together a respectful, short, easy to follow resource of major evolutionary concepts that science writers could consult whenever they wrote a piece involving evolutionary aspects, would they use it? Would my friends in the science writer world promote it, refer colleagues to it, send authors who get things wrong to it? If it would be worth the effort, I’d be glad to cover things like natural selection and phylogenetics, which are very commonly misunderstood. (And for the record, this is not a shot at science writers — I am also working on a review aimed at genomics researchers). What specific things would you like to see included if such a resource were assembled?
I appreciate comments and ideas from everyone, but I am especially interested in hearing from science writers as they are the intended users.
Two students and I currently have a paper in review on genome sizes in sponges, but whether it is accepted or needs major revisions, we will have to update the reference list. This is because the genome sequence of the sponge Amphimedon queenslandica was just published. This is very cool, and allows some interesting comparisons with morphologically more complex animals as well as with the single-celled choanoflagellates. However, this being a genome sequence and all, we can expect the following to show up in various reports:
1. Misconceptions about evolution.
Check. Here’s a headline from a press release by Rice University: “Sponge shines light on life’s origin”. This is off by about 3 billion years. The subtitle to the press release is also awful: “Genome connects the dots between Amphimedon, animal descendants”. Nope. Amphimedon queenslandica is a modern species and is not the ancestor of any non-sponge animals (and probably not of any sponge species either). The common ancestor of all animals may have been sponge-like, but it was not a modern sponge species.
2. Hype about medical significance.
Check. The original paper itself and various news stories play up the “sponges will teach us lots about how to cure cancer” angle. I’ll be glad when (if?) it becomes unnecessary to tie everything to human health for it to gain support. Sequencing the sponge genome has many merits on its own, but the realities of grant competitions dictate that one must often find a link to cancer or climate change to get funded.
Anyway, kudos to the researchers on an interesting contribution to the animal genome dataset!
UPDATE: Along with Jonathan Eisen, I am glad to endorse the press release by UCSB, which shows how important evolutionary concepts can be weaved effectively into a news report. I *almost* was put off by the use of the term “basal”, which is terribly misleading and some implication that this *species* has been around for 650 million years (it definitely has not), but the story author and the researchers interviewed totally redeem themselves with this: “‘You had some ancestral animal that is long-since extinct, and its descendants became these modern-day sponges that we have, and there were other descendants that became the rest of the animal kingdom –– from jellyfish to baboons,’ said Kosik. ‘We speak of the sponge as being this earliest branching phylum, or group of animals.’ ” I’m not sure who the author of the press release was, but he/she did a very nice job here.
When I was a grad student, I installed SETI@home on a bunch of lab computers, which served as a screen saver and crunched data from scans of the sky in search of aliens whenever the computer was idle. I thought this was a neat idea, as it tapped into the processing power and electricity being wasted on huge numbers of computers that are left on in labs most of the time. Plus, wouldn’t it be cool if your computer found a viable signal?
An even cooler application of this principle of distributed analysis, crowdsourcing, or whatever-it’s-called, is FoldIt, a video game created by Seth Cooper (University of Washington) and colleagues in which human brains are recruited to solve complex protein-folding challenges. The results are generally very useful because the players are able to solve the 3D structures of proteins that can be challenging even for current computers and software.
I am not surprised that this works, since gamers are adept at figuring out complex puzzles and, especially when there is a competitive aspect, are pretty obsessive about completing challenges. (Cases in point: King of Kong, Chasing Ghosts). The manifestation of this tendency varies. My younger brother likes to do/complete/collect/find everything possible in a game whereas my focus has always been on finishing the game as efficiently as possible — I say screw all the little items that don’t add anything much. Name a game, and someone will have written a walkthrough detailing every single step in the game (i.e., even worse than my brother) and someone else will have figured out a trick to complete any given task rapidly (i.e., even worse than me; check out “speedruns” on Youtube for examples).
It’s a neat use of talent and obsessiveness for the greater protein-folding good. It’s probably also pretty fun.
If you have a subscription, you can read the paper by Cooper et al. (2010) describing FoldIt in Nature.
The discussion about the definition of “professional scientist” has been interesting, with a range of opinions shown. But this raises the question — what criteria make someone a “scientist”, or even a “professional scientist” if such a distinction is necessary?
Here are the criteria I threw out off-handedly for the purpose of discussing the NYT story about science blogs:
- Does scientific research for a living,
- Publishes research in peer-reviewed journals,
- Is funded by granting agencies to do it,
- Does not just write about it, or study it, or do some of it as a grad student, or only teach it.
This wasn’t an official or proposed definition, as indicated by the qualifier “For the purpose of this post”. Others have raised objections to one or more of these. I don’t think they are all necessary and certainly none is sufficient. So, let’s go through the exercise and think of some criteria that would distinguish a “professional scientist”. Nowhere in here is there an implication that graduate students, industry scientists, government scientists, postdocs, or anyone else doesn’t “do science” when they are engaged in research, so let’s get beyond that straw man if we can.
As I noted in the last post, lots of people want to be called “scientist”, presumably because it carries some prestige. But if anyone who does an experiment is a “scientist”, then the term isn’t meaningful at all.
So, assuming that we want the term to mean something, what makes someone a scientist?
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We have been having a discussion here about the terms “scientist”, “professional”, and so on, and I have noticed a pretty clear polarity that verges on paradoxical:
Either the term “scientist” is defined so broadly that it is essentially meaningless, such that being called “scientist” carries no prestige, or else it is defined in a restricted but meaningful way that excludes and thus offends a great many people who want to be called “scientist” because of the attached prestige.
It reminds me of the old joke: “I would never want to join a club that would have me as a member”.
Part two of the discussion that started about graduate students is about people who have PhDs in a scientific discipline and may even have faculty positions in a science department. Does having such a position automatically make someone a “professional scientist”? To kick things off, I will quote from one post cited in the comment thread of the last discussion, and one new comment from the thread. It so happens that one is from an Associate Professor, the other from a student.
Is Richard Dawkins a scientist? “How can you ask that? He’s probably only one of the most famous scientists in the world!” I don’t advertise myself as an actor, even though I was an extra once. Or as an artist, even though I did some cartooning some time ago. And I even got paid for it. Dawkins has a doctorate in science, is a great synthesizer of other people’s science, one of the greatest advocates for science around, but when was the last time he did any original science? When did he last analyze any data?
…
The “general public” is famously unable to name a single living scientist. That they cannot may be due in part to a lot of people being described as scientists when they are not actively involved in science. Professional scientists have clear marching orders: Test hypotheses by generating data, and publish the results. (Yes, I know theoreticians don’t necessarily generate their own data, so don’t come bugging me.) Should scientists, as a profession, be a little more assertive about who gets to use that professional label?
The problem I find with your definition of scientist being a PI is that it links the term ‘scientist’ (which the public perceives as “people who actually do science”) to academic titles, which are not necessarily indicative of quality or intelligence. I’ve read papers by established PIs that would make an undergrad blush. I think what matters more than title is how close the author is to the bench, figuratively speaking. People like Dawkins, despite him having been a ‘proper’ PI in the past, do not make the cut for being ‘practicing scientists’, in my view (in agreement with Zen Faulkes’ post), as they have been removed from the bench (or field) for decades. In this view, Dawkins is no more deserving of the ‘practicing scientist’ title than Random Blogging Grad Student. He’s a practicing science WRITER, as you would probably argue. I’ve definitely felt more like a scientist when running experiments, etc, than I do now in my writing job, even though my current job is a bit more intellectually demanding and requires lots of reading and thinking about scientific literature.
I’ll leave the discussion open as to whether others should/shouldn’t be excluded from the category of “professional scientist” as we have been defining it. I will note, though, that my original post said the following:
For the purpose of this post, “professional scientist” is defined as someone who does scientific research for a living, publishes research in peer-reviewed journals, and is funded by granting agencies to do it. Not just writes about it, or is studying it, or doing some of it as a grad student, or only teaches it. Science bloggers — people who have blogs partly or mostly about science — are not necessarily, or even usually, professional scientists.
This was never meant to be just about graduate students, but I wanted that discussion to play out first. Now let’s talk about profs.
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My anti spam plugin seems to be working well, so I am going to try opening the comments up so that moderation isn’t required. Hopefully the spam won’t pile up again this time. (You still have to give a name and email, though — anonymous comments have a way of being silly.)
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