Science Careers Blog

Last month we ran Returning to Science by Sarah Webb, an article about women returning to science after extended family leaves. The same week we also published A Life Lived Backwards by Angela Saini, about Patricia Alireza, the University College-London physicist who didn't even start graduate school until her family was grown.

In connection with those articles we conducted an online poll to figure out how our readers -- overwhelmingly postdocs and graduate students -- are planning to balance family and career. Of those who took the survey, 49% were graduate students and 43% were postdocs. The remaining 8% were split evenly between "undergraduate student" and "other".

The result of the survey was, to me, both surprising and pleasing: The most popular approach, it seems, is not to wait. Nearly half of our readers "expect/plan to have children while still in training." More than a quarter of respondents already have children. About a quarter -- 24.5% -- plan to wait until after their careers are established before having children. 2% don't intend to have children at all.

All these choices are valid, but with the training phase getting longer and scientific independence happening later, it's good to see that among those who want children, nearly half feel they don't have to wait. The results follow in graphical form.
 

For the first time in 5 weeks, the number of new flu cases at American colleges and universities has dropped, according to a tracking survey by the American College Health Association (ACHA). The survey, which tracks influenza-like illnesses on campuses, reported 6373 new cases in the week ending 13 November at the 263 reporting institutions, a drop of 27% from the week earlier.

The 263 institutions taking part in the survey cover a campus population of almost 3,000,000, and the number of new cases represents what ACHA calls an "attack-rate" of 21.3 cases per 10,000 people served.  That rate is down from 29 cases per 10,000 a week earlier.

Despite the drop, the survey still found flu to be a widespread problem on campus. Some 249 of the 263 institutions, or 95%, reported at least one new case in the last week. During that week, 12 of the cases required hospitalization and 2 patients died.

The drop in the number of new cases was the first weekly decline and the lowest attack rate since 9 October. Yet the rate has dropped before, since ACHA started tracking new flu illnesses, in early September and again in late October, only to start rising again soon thereafter.

The ACHA survey tracks all flu cases, using the CDC definition of influenza-like illnesses: both a fever of 100 degress (F) or higher, and a cough or sore throat. The survey does not break out the types of flu diagnosed, H1N1 or seasonal varieties. However, according to the CDC as of the first week of November, all but a handful of new flu cases were H1N1.

ComputerWorld magazine reported yesterday that U.S. immigration authorities have ramped up their field inspections for H-1B visa violations. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, told Sen. Chuck Grassley (R, Ia.) that it will conduct some 25,000 inspections of workplaces hiring staff under the H-1B program in the current fiscal year, which began in October.

H-1B visas, which admit non-immigrant skilled workers for a limited number of years, have come under fire recently because of allegations that American companies use the visas to bring in foreign workers, including many engineers and scientists, to avoid hiring higher-salaried American staff. In addition, during the past year evidence has emerged of increasing fraud and abuse of individual visa holders, on which Beryl Benderly has reported for Science Careers. The Science Careers blog has also noted reduced demand for H-1B visas during 2009 and diminishing political support for the program.

Earlier this month, Grassley, a frequent critic of H-1B visas, wrote a letter to USCIS requesting more enforcement of the rules, noting incidents in Iowa where companies brought in foreign workers under the program even though the jobs that the companies identified in their H-1B petitions were no longer available. Grassley also pointed to incidents where companies hired H-1B visa holders then outsourced them to other work sites, another rules violation.

ComputerWorld says that Alejandro Mayorkas, director of USCIS, told Grassley that the inspections will determine "whether the location of employment actually exists and if a beneficiary is employed at the location specified, performing the duties as described, and paid the salary as identified in the petition." The 25,000 inspections planned for this fiscal year is nearly a five-fold increase over the 5,200 conducted last year.

The number of science and engineering students from abroad jumped 20% at American institutions in the 2008-09 academic year, with the biggest gains recorded in engineering and computer science. Science and engineering students now comprise about half of all international students in the U.S. and nearly two-thirds of international graduate students.

According to the Open Doors survey, conducted annually by the Institute of International Education (IIE, funded by the U.S. Department of State), the number of science and engineering students increased from about 267,000 in the 2007-08 academic year to about 319,000 in 2008-09, an increase of nearly 20%.  That's about half (48%) of the 671,600 international students in the United States in 2008-09, up from 43% of the total in the previous year.

Except for agriculture, international students in all the scientific and engineering categories increased by double-digit percentages in 2008-09. Engineering and computer/information science students increased by about a quarter (24%), while life, physical, social, and health science disciplines all increased between 14-17%. The number of agricultural students from abroad stayed about the same as in 2007-08.

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Nearly two-thirds (65%) of international graduate students at American universities during the 2008-09 study science or engineering. About a quarter (24%) of international graduate students are in engineering programs and 13% of international graduate students are in the physical and life sciences. About 11% of international graduate students are studying mathematics or computer science,  and 9% of international graduate students are in the social sciences.

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About 4 in 10 international undergraduates are in science or engineering programs. Some 12% of international undergrads are studying engineering, while nearly 1 in 10 (9%) are majoring in the social sciences. About 5-7% each are in undergraduate physical/life science, mathematics/computer science, or health programs.

Overall, the number of international students in the U.S. increased by nearly 8% in 2008-09, to 671,600. Of the total, about 41% come from India, China, or South Korea. The number of students from China increased by about 21% year over year. Vietnamese students increased by 46%, to about 12,800, compared to 2007-08 -- the largest increase for any country. (IIE did not provide country breakdowns by field of study.)

We are grateful to Mr. Richmond for his feedback on our coverage of the changes in science in Eastern Europe since 1989. Many official exchange programs were indeed in place between the East and the West in the decades preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall -- not just with the Soviet Union, as Richmond describes, but also with the Eastern European Soviet satellite states that were the subject of our feature. As we wrote in the paragraph Richmond cites:

"The Soviet-controlled governments of the former Eastern Bloc valued science and scientific research. But decisions on funding and scientific priorities were controlled by the government, and scientific importance often played little role in those decisions. Research in those countries was done in near-complete isolation from the international community. The circulation of people and scientific information was meticulously controlled, and access to training opportunities abroad, and even international research journals, was highly restricted."
 
The scientists participating in formal exchange programs, and the scientific areas they represented, were carefully selected by their national authorities. Scientists not taking part in such programs -- that is, most scientists -- had a much harder time getting a passport. The Eastern scientists we talked to told us that it was very difficult to be authorized to leave the country. Even if they were given permission to, let's say, go to an international conference, the scarce funding and high exchange rates meant that they often could not afford the trip.
 
Many of the scientists we interviewed also told us of the restricted, sometimes nonexistent, access to international journals. This was before the Internet era, so it left individual Eastern scientists with little means of finding out what their counterparts in the West were doing. We were told for example that a letter sent from Romania to Germany could take 2 months to arrive, and letters were often opened and censored by the Ceauşescu government before it fell.
 
We appreciate you bringing to our attention the details of these scholarly and scientific exchange programs, which no doubt contributed to the scientific advancement of the Soviet Union. Yet the objective of our article was to summarize the situation for the majority of scientists on the ground in Eastern European countries, and to focus on how science and individual scientists in these countries have advanced since 1989.

 - Elisabeth Pain and Kate Travis

Our package on science in Eastern Europe provoked the following reply from Yale Richmond, an expert on the subject:

Elisabeth Pain and Kate Travis in Science Careers (November 6, 2009) are correct in discussing the changes in science that have taken place in Eastern Europe since "The Fall of the Wall." But the two authors are mistaken when they write that "Research in those countries [the Soviet bloc] was done in near-complete isolation from the international community."
 
Using primarily cultural and scientific exchanges, in addition to espionage, the Soviets had a very effective system for learning what scientists in countries of the West were doing. During the 30 years of the U.S.-Soviet Cultural Agreement more than 50,000 Soviet citizens came to the United States on exchange, many of them scientists and engineers, and many thousands more came to countries of Western Europe that had similar agreements. And because the exchanges were reciprocal, U.S. and other Western scientists went to the Soviet Union in exchange. The Soviets were all cleared by the KGB in advance of nomination for their exchange visits, but before their U.S. visas were authorized they were also screened by the U.S. intelligence community to ensure that they would have no access to U.S.-funded defense research, and that the exchanges were mutually beneficial. The watchword was "Is the Soviet scientist going to learn more from us than we will learn from him?"  And they were all "hims," since no women scientists were nominated by the Soviets.

In our "flagship exchange," of graduate students and young faculty for a full academic year, we would send real graduate students in language, history, and literature, while the Soviets, in the early years of the exchanges, would send us mainly scientists and engineers who already had their Kandidat degree, more or less equivalent to our PhD. Each U.S.-USSR cultural agreement, renegotiated every 2 or 3 years, also contained a section devoted to exchanges of delegations of scientists in various fields.

In addition to the exchange programs of the State Department, our National Academy of Sciences and Atomic Energy Commission also had exchanges with the Soviet bloc. To give you an idea of the extent of those exchange programs, when martial law was declared in Poland in 1981, we had several hundred Polish scientists stuck in the United States and unwilling to return home. Also, Pain and Travis fail to consider the 11 cooperative agreements in S & T signed with the Soviet Union during the detente years of the 1970s which brought hundreds more Soviet scientists to the United States, and a reciprocal number of Americans to the Soviet Union.
 
After their return home and their debriefing by science officials, the Soviet scientists who had studied abroad were required to give talks to their colleagues on what they had learned during their foreign visit. As a result of all those exchange programs, Soviet science was anything but isolated from the international community.

For more on this, read my book, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).

             - Yale Richmond

(We'll post the authors' reply in a separate post. My thanks to Yale Richmond for his thoughtful reply.)

Attaining a Ph.D. degree takes commitment and perseverance, as any Ph.D. candidate can attest. But the way Nicholas Kristoff tells it, in yesterday's New York Times Tererai Trent, a plant pathologist and Ph.D. candidate at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, demonstrated commitment and perseverance in the quest that few students at American universities are expected to endure.

Now 44, Trent came from a village in rural Zimbabwe, where, as tradition dictates, she was married off to a much older man at age 11. Most girls subjected to such conditions have ended up illiterate and poor, tending to small plots of land or herds of livestock. But 12 years after her marriage, Jo Luck, president of the rural aid organization Heifer International, visited Trent's village, and encouraged the village women to talk about their dreams and at least try to make them a reality.

Trent wrote down her dreams -- to go the United States and get an education -- on a scrap of paper, put the paper in a box, and buried it under a pile of rocks. Heifer International gave her a goat and she began to make extra money selling its milk. Later, she went to work for Heifer International and other aid groups as a community organizer in Zimbabwe. When she finished secondary school, the income saved up from her work at Heifer International helped her enroll at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, in 1998.

You're probably imaging smooth sailing for Trent the rest of the way. Think again. By the time she started school she had 5 children that she was not ready to abandon to their traditional and abusive father. Her husband agreed to let the children go with her to Oklahoma, but on one condition: that he could come along as well. The airfares soaked up much Trent's savings, Kristoff says, and she and her family lived in a ramshackle trailer with little income -- with nothing but beatings from a frustrated and abusive husband to welcome her home after class.

Financial and other help came, eventually, from a university colleague and the Stillwater community, and that help enabled her to complete her B.A. degree in agricultural education -- and to get her husband deported. When he would return later, frail and suffering from AIDS, Trent took him back in until he died of the disease. (Kristoff says Trent tested negative for the HIV virus.)

Trent continued at Oklahoma State, getting an M.S. degree in plant pathology, marrying her current husband, plant pathologist Mark Trent, and becoming Heifer International's Deputy Director for Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluation. Her interest in assessing effectiveness led her to an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program at Western Michigan University, in evaluation. Her dissertation is called, "Toward an Integral Systematic Evaluation Approach in the Face of HIV/AIDS in Developing Countries."

She returned once to her village in Zimbabwe and found the pile of rocks under which she buried the box with her goals written down, Kristoff says, and she checks off her goals as they are achieved. Trent checked off the last item after defending her Ph.D. dissertation. The degree will be awarded in December.

Whether it's good news or bad news depends on your perspective. A new report from the American Institute of Physics (AIP) shows that physics degree production is up dramatically. The most recent data are from 2006.

* In 2006, 5373 students earned bachelor's degrees in physics, up 5% over the previous year and 47% over 1999.

* That same year, 1380 physics Ph.D.s were granted, up 11% over the year before and 26% over 2004.

* Undergraduate astronomy degrees was up 98% in 2006, over 1997.

AIP also released a Focus on Astronomy Degrees, with slightly more recent data. These data showed the number of astronomy bachelor's degrees dipping in 2007 compared to a year earlier.

The Wellcome Trust plans to phase out its 3-year to 5-year research grants in favor of larger and more flexible grants that last up to 7 years, reports Jocelyn Kaiser in this week's issue of Science. The organization will put $183 million toward the new Investigator Awards beginning in 2011.

"The idea is to empower the very best scientists to tackle difficult, long-term questions," says Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, a U.K.-based charity that funds biomedical research. The organization hopes that the awards will help researchers more successfully tackle large research questions without the constraints of low funding or a short grant cycle.

Read the full story in this week's issue of Science, and see the Wellcome Trust Web site for the announcement of the new program.

A few weeks ago, the visual science journal I edit received a manuscript from an outstanding group of research physicians at a major university center.  In addition to two senior authors, the manuscript had four additional authors, each of whose credentials and roles in the study were well defined.  On reading the manuscript, my impression was that the study was well done and contained useful new information.  Accordingly, I assigned it for more detailed review to two reviewers who are authorities in the field.

The first review advised acceptance after some minor changes.  The second review was basically in agreement, but stated that the discussion contained a plagiarized paragraph from a previously published work.  The reviewer cited the original source.  On checking, I found this was indeed the case. I called the second reviewer and asked her how she had recognized the plagiarism.  She said the literary style of the paragraph in question was different from the rest of the paper.  She entered the paragraph into Google and it brought up the publication in which the paragraph first appeared.

We contacted the senior author of the submitted manuscript and he was surprised and embarrassed to learn of the plagiarism. He said the paragraph of concern had been contributed by one of the authors, who was a medical student working on the study.  This student called me soon after and, in the ensuing tearful conversation, explained she had recorded the paragraph verbatim with the intention of rewriting it in her own words, but was caught up in exams.  Under pressure from the senior author to contribute "her portion" of the manuscript and in the heat of the moment, she  inadvertently submitted the original material without quotation marks or citing its source.

She was obviously frightened and contrite and, indeed, had reason to be.  Plagiarism, even if inadvertent, is a serious offense in science.  It is the usual policy of our journal and many others to report plagiarism to the respective university authorities in the case of academic research. Disciplinary action usually follows.  The submitted paper is rejected and editors of other journals in the field are alerted to the plagiarism and the names of those involved.  Future works from the offending authors are handled with intense scrutiny and caution.

This was explained to the author responsible for the plagiarism, as well as her fellow authors.  After rejecting the paper and carefully investigating the matter, we were finally convinced that this was a bitterly regretted "first offense" for the responsible author and a unique occurrence for all the authors involved.  Consequently, we did not carry it beyond the rejection and stern warning. 

It is nonetheless a cautionary tale because plagiarism can derail a scientific career at any stage.