By: Ina Nikoleva This blog post is going to be a little different. It is quite excusable, and dare I say, natural, that when faced with obstacles, like the relentless shrinking of scientific funding (especially for what we now refer to as “basic science”), the looming reality of the “post-truth” society, and the heartbreaking phrase “previous experience required” peppering every job ad, that all of us budding scientists have become The future job. The future interview. The next step. I recently started reading Richard Dawkins’ collection called The Oxford Book of Modern Scientific Writing, and right off the bat in the Acknowledgements section, he states: “This is a collection of good writing by professional scientists, not excursions into science by professional writers.” That was when it hit me. We must now spend so much time culturing ourselves into hirable applicants that the science often falls by the wayside to a lesser or greater degree. We hear advice like, “It’s OK not to spend every waking hour in the lab,” and “You need to make time to network/practice soft skills/polish your resume/apply for jobs.” And that saddens me, as we all entered a PhD program presumably because of our love for science, for facts, for probing into the depths of a discipline where no one has probed before or in a way that no one has tried before. 
Another article I came across recently focuses on the fraud currently going on in science. You have all encountered at least one story of that post doc or grad student who faked data just to get a paper, that professor who discarded data points to get the grant, or even that Nature paper that got retracted because three other labs tried to run the same experiment and all got irrefutably negative results. This one article in particular, I kid you not, describes how easy it is nowadays for professors to invent and impersonate fake academic scientists to serve as editors and suggested reviewers on papers at smaller journals in order to facilitate acceptance of the papers of the real guy. (See here and trust me, it is as funny as it is tragic – give it a read.) Yup, you heard me – some academics are now resorting to faking entire scientists instead of faking their data. And that brings me to the point of this blog post. While the professional scientist may be less and less appreciated by the public today, WE know that high-quality scientists are essential to society. No career, whether in academia or industry, will flourish if you don’t cultivate your strong base in rigorous scientific research NOW. So, while we all spend so much time looking to the future, we should take a deep breath and also look at the present (funding permitting). Build your base and conduct your science wisely, so that when you get to the industry or academic position of your choice, you can spot the garbage science and not invest in it, permit its publication, or try to build your own company’s future drug on it. The science is still important. And as much as people try to pass off facts as “opinions” nowadays so that they don’t have to deal with them, WE know scientific facts prevail whether people believe in them or not. Our entire society and civilization are based on them. So please, treat your science well. Try to look past the low salaries, the lack of overtime, the excuse of, “Well, you are in training, so you don’t deserve any better right now” and continue to appreciate the wonder of your scientific field and all the good one solid, undoctored publication could do the world. This is what builds us and what makes PhDs special. In the end, this is what will make the difference between sinking and swimming in pharma, consulting, writing, academia, a government position, or any others that don’t fit into those neat categories. Good science always prevails, even in the darkest and most hopeless of times.
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