Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
Today’s column goes out to readers in graduate school. Are you feeling as if you have more to do than a single person can accomplish? Does your boss expect a lot of you, pushing for results? All that can be pretty standard for the PhD experience, but here’s another question: does your research advisor scream… Read More
This article, from Nature‘s Careers section, has a lot of sound advice for people making it through graduate school. It’s presented as a list of things not to do, and I would agree with all of them. And I think that most anyone who’s been through the experience would as well. Among these is an… Read More
I have enough time today for a quick question, one that’s also being asked by several people on Twitter. Back when I was a grad student, there was definite pressure on people to seek an academic position. I saw more than one group where this pressure was applied selectively to the more promising-seeming grad students/postdocs… Read More
According to this new survey, depression and anxiety are far more common among graduate students than in the general population. This should surprise no one at all, but it’s good to have some quantitative data on the problem. There are limitations to the study – for one thing, it’s quite possible that (self-selected) respondents w… Read More
There are some pretty big funding changes being proposed at the NIH that many people may not be aware of. A concerned NIH grantee has sent along some links and comments about these, and I think that they’re worth bringing up. Here’s a blog post by Mike Lauer of the NIH going into some details: Read More
There’s a follow-up in Science to their story about a situation in Lee Rubin’s group at Harvard. A long list of present and former Rubin lab members and scientific collaborators have written a letter about the article, and about Prof. Rubin. “It is our collective experience“, they write, “that besides being an outstan… Read More
If you haven’t read this article, about a completely out-of-control conflict (in the Lee Rubin stem cell lab at Harvard) between a graduate student and his advisor, have a look. I’ve seen some pretty dysregulated relationships in that area, but nothing like this one: misconduct allegations, forced psychiatric evaluations, and this: Germ… Read More
I’ve had a chance recently to talk to some people who are heading off to chemistry grad school in the fall, which brought back memories of when I did that a mere thirty-three years ago. A lot has changed over that time, but there are some very important things that haven’t. One of the most… Read More
The circus is coming to town – that’s the only conclusion I can immediately draw from this post at Retraction Watch. It provides an update on something I blogged about last in 2014, the fallout from a retracted paper from the Martin group at UT-Austin. When last heard from, the university was trying to retract… Read More
Stuart Cantrill’s blog pointed me to an online copy of this article, “Researchmanship”. I was given a copy of it from the (now defunct) ACS Chemtech in the 1980s, while I was in grad school, so it had a great effect on me. It recounts the techniques of one James J. Pudvin for getting through… Read More
