They can't be serious ...

Great design though.

z.

I can't see where it is for!

It's an ad to attract postdocs and gradstudents to HHMI's
new Janelia Farm.

http://www.hhmi.org/janelia/

Fantastic. Do they have pensions and benefits for postdocs? Since I'm working myself to death anyways I might as well do it somewhere where I can at least leave my wife a decent life insurance benefit or (pretending for one moment that I am back in the US) can pay my medical bills if I happen to survive.

Seriously, we're scientists and we know this life-style is counter productive. Why do we all do it?

"Live great science- by not having a life."

Love it. As if supervisers need any encouragment to imply that anyone not pulling late nights in the lab is a slacker...

TP,

Actually I'm sure that the benefits there are great. When I first started in Tom's lab I was placed in the HHMI payroll and I had great benefits. Then I got a fellowship that was administered by Harvard and *poof* all the benefits disappeared.

Alex, I've been *poofed* twice now on fellowships, once for my grad fellowship and again on my postdoc fellowship. There is something deeply troubling about that. Fellowships are supposed to be an honor but they tend to be bad for us financially. We don't get retirement matching (at least I haven't) and we generally have to skimp on the insurance policy we can afford rather than the one everyone else gets. While the prestige of fellowships may pay off in the long-term, what happens if a major medical or other problem occurs while you're paying for bare minimum benefits?

"Seriously, we're scientists and we know this life-style is counter productive."

Whether this life-style is productive or not depends on your motivations and goals. It is very productive if your motivation is an uncontrollable compulsion to learn as much as you can about the nature of reality, and your goals are to move your science forward as rapidly as possible and achieve scientific independence.

If your motivation is to make a decent living doing something that is reasonably interesting, and your goal is to have somewhere to show up every day from 9 to 5, then it is counter-productive.

Frankly, I do not want people like this in my lab. My laboratory is not a bank, and my grad students and post-docs are not bank tellers. Science is a calling, and if you are not called to it, then you should do something else.

PhysioProf, I think you misunderstood my point. Look at the research on sleep deprivation and productivity, working too many hours and quality of work, etc., etc.. Every indication is that the stereotypical science lifestyle (as exemplified by the ad) is not helping anyone in achieving their sceintific goals. Moreover, these types of slogans (in my opinion) add to the already high degree of pressure for postdocs to work endless hours (whether or not there is pressure from the PI).

Of course its a calling and the vast majority of postdocs I know feel it is an honor and priveldge to be able to call themselves scientists. On the other hand, we have mirrors and can see the bags under our eyes and ackowledge the silly mistakes that start to occur in our work when we have overworked ourselves. We can then go to the literature and see that we might have been able to predict these effects based on the work of our esteemed colleagues. That was my point.

Fair enough. The point I make to my trainees is that the *science* determines the pace and rhythm of the work. When you have a good electrophysiology prep going, you just keep at it until *it* peters out. If this means that you stay in the lab all night, so be it. If this also means that after a few days of 12-14 hour days, you take an extra full day or so off, that is also fine.

When a grant application is due, or final experiments are being done for a paper submission, you might average 12 hours per day, 7 days per week, for four or five weeks. Afterwards, if you then disappear for a week, that is fine.

What is *not* fine, is to think that you can really do high-quality, cutting-edge experimental science working 9-5, 5 days per week, coming and going at the same time every day, regardless of the demands of the science.

Well, I think that's the way it's always been done (at least recently), but that sure as hell doesn't mean that it's the best way to do science. While I agree that you stay until the job is done, there are other things on life that are important. When I started grad school I thought that was hte ideal. Now that I'm married and have a 11 mo daughter and a good postdoc, suddenly my priorities have changed in a big way. I had enough of that in the lab till 3am crap for 4 years in grad school. Now, I want to get home in time to play with my daughter.

"Now that I'm married and have a 11 mo daughter and a good postdoc, suddenly my priorities have changed in a big way. I had enough of that in the lab till 3am crap for 4 years in grad school. Now, I want to get home in time to play with my daughter."

Just be aware that you are competing for publications, grants, and, ultimately, independent positions with scientists who are not worried about what time they get home. At its highest levels, science is a pursuit that rewards extreme effort and attention, and punishes moderation.

This is no different from music, art, theater, business, literature, and other creative pursuits. The best at these pursuits make mastering their pursuit their first priority, far ahead of anything else.

Is this the same Physioprof posting comments over on my blog telling me what a fabulous advocate for women in science he is and how great he treats the women in his lab? But here I see he drives them mercilessly and looks on them like highly efficient pieces of lab equipment that one can expect to function 24/7 if needed? He doesn't believe that one can have a reasonable balance between career and life and still look upon one's self as committed to a science career? That he sees nothing wrong with a system that structually advantages men and disadvantages women, who disproportionately bear the responsibility not just for child care, but care for aging parents and ill family members? That even as medical schools have begun to realize that it's not a good idea to make residents work more than, oh, 80 hours per week, Physioprof thinks his lab members ought to be prepared to work just as long as he thinks is necessary, sleep be damned?

This science-as-sacred-calling stuff is a sack of horseshit that needs to be done away with once and for all. It's a sweet mode of life for men subsidized by the labor of women who take care of the details of daily life at home, and the labor of graduate students and postdocs who work ungodly hours for dismal wages and no benefits. It's a stinking, rotten, lie to pretend that this is the only way that good science can be done. One of the best labs I ever worked in was run by a woman who had many, many women working in her lab, nearly all of whom were married and several of whom had children while they were working with her. Her lab was extremely productive and very high profile in my field, respected internationally, and considered one of the top two or three in the discipline. Nobody in her lab worked the kind of hours you describe as necessary. The work involved cell culture of primary human breast cancer cells and studies of tumors in nude mice - all tricky, demanding, labor-intensive stuff. But every single person in her lab had a life. They went home and played with their children in the evening. Late Friday evening you would find no one in the lab because they were all at home for the Sabbath.

Pernicious shit, this fostering of myth that 1 a.m. in the lab is a necessity for "true" scientists. Physioprof, please don't make me puke on your shoes.

"At its highest levels, science is a pursuit that rewards extreme effort and attention, and punishes moderation."

Well then, I suppose i'm lucky that I'm not really interested in doing science at it's highest levels. In the end, I do it because it interests me and I'm good at it. I have no interest in getting a faculty job at a large U or research institute, and would be perfectly happy at a smaller school.

Of course, with my moderate approach, I still am looking at having between 2-3 pubs in the first year of my postdoc, so I ain't doing too bad by anyones standards.

Besides, I always thought that 120 hour a week crap was a bunch of Bear Bryant (if not MOnty Python) BS anyway. Quantity of work is not an accurate measure of anything other than your stamina. Creativity is not forced.

"But here I see he drives them mercilessly and looks on them like highly efficient pieces of lab equipment that one can expect to function 24/7 if needed?"

This is not even close to what I said, and it is not even close to how I treat my trainees. And please don't puke on my shoes, they are suede and would be hard to clean.

What I am saying--and what I interpret the Janelia Farms ad as suggesting--is that sometimes you *are* in the lab in the middle of the night or all night long. And sometimes you are in that situation because things have come together--methodologically and/or conceptually--and you are really making great headway on a scientific problem that absolutely fascinates you, and you want to take advantage of that opportunity.

And when everything comes together like that, and you are in the mental state that sports psychologists refer to as "flow", that feeling that you achieve associated with pushing forward the boundaries of human knowledge is what makes science worth doing. The opportunities that present themselves to have this sort of "peak" experience are driven by the temporal rhythms of the *science*, not by an externally imposed work schedule. Sometimes these opportunites present themselves during normal work hours, but sometimes they don't.

I do *not* count the hours spent in the lab by my trainees, and I do *not* keep track of what time they come and go. What I do is expect them to be prepared to respond to the temporal rhythms of the science, *when* such a response is warranted.

Wow, it's amazing how one "ad" can bring out all this emotion.

PhysioProf, I understand, you look at this ad and you see passion, dedication and all these other virtues. And the rest of you (me included) see this ad as representative of an academic system gone amok. Sure we all value working hard and getting the answers (for the love of science) but most postdocs want to stay in academia and feel the weight of the numbers on their shoulders. There are more postdocs vying for fewer and fewer jobs. Postdoc positions are lasting longer and longer. Postdocs are implicitly asked to sacrifice more and more. My boss does not monitor our lab presence, but 90% of the postdocs I know are workaholics and feel trapped. Unfortunately postdocs are temporary and have not really fought for better security, benefits etc. but many PIs have seen this trend. In the late 90s they lobbied the NIH to increase the "suggested wages" in the NIH guidelines to help postdocs. Our salaries went up from the 28K to 40K. But our jobs are more insecure than ever. We put in the long hours for a chance of getting our own lab.

All this venting by many individuals is just a manifestation of our collected frustration at the current system. (In an attempt to bring more PIs and postdocs into the discussion, this comment will be posted as an entry.)