The Spectroscope Research, conversations, policy, debates, controversies. en-us The Spectroscope Research, conversations, policy, debates, controversies. A reproducible effect: failing to credit women scientists for their leadership.









Original article:

Lenny Teytelman
The programming language does make a difference for bioinformatics. (From a Perl lover who knows no Python.)

This isn't a technical blog post where I dive into the relative strengths of Perl and Python. That's because I know zero Python but sometimes have dreams in Perl. I learned Perl in the lab of Lincoln Stein, taught it several times as a TA in his CSHL Programming for Biologist class, and organized a similar bootcamp in Berkeley. Sure, there were others before 2001 (7K lines of Visual Basic code when I worked as a database developer and C++/JAVA as undergrad), but 99.9% of the code I wrote as a bioinformatician between 2001-2013 was in Perl. 

I've also said many times that the programming language isn't all that important. It is true that the fundamental programming concepts matter, but all else is just syntax. However, it is not true that the programming language makes no difference at all, or we would all be coding in Assembler and Fortran today. Computer languages evolve and new ones appear for good reason. The programming course I started as a graduate student at Berkeley in 2007 was in Perl the first two times we taught it, and as I left the next student instructors changed to Python. I understand that it's because Python is a better first language for a biologist who has never programmed before the class.

Two days ago, my friend Gary Lupyan, a cognitive sciences professor at Madison-Wisconsin who encourages Python use in his lab, asked me:

There were countless responses to the question (also here and under these threads). The consensus seems to be that almost everyone has switched to Python or R. The exception is people who are working with massive legacy code projects or folks like me whose fingers type Perl using muscle memory. 

Of course, there is a time barrier for someone like me to learn Python. Of course, I can do everything in Perl that you can do in Python. However, it doesn't mean that the language doesn't matter. It matters for learning, it matters for readability and reproducibility by others. Using Perl may be easier for those of us who already know it, but it seems clear from the responses above that it's not the best choice for bioinformatics today.

Original article:

Lenny Teytelman
Veruscript: the academic publisher built for academics or Putin?

A week ago, the Financial Times ran the story, Intelligence experts accuse Cambridge forum of Kremlin links. It raised the possibility that a new publisher Veruscript is set up to promote Russian interests:

Sir Richard [the ex-chief of MI6] and his colleagues suspect that Veruscript — a newly established digital publishing house that has provided funding to set up a new journal of intelligence and to cover some of the seminar’s costs — may be acting as a front for the Russian intelligence services. They fear that Russia may be seeking to use the seminar as an impeccably-credentialed platform to covertly steer debate and opinion on high-level sensitive defence and security topics, two people familiar with their thinking said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

I shared the above story via Twitter and forgot about it. A day later, the publisher tagged me in their outraged response to the article. One paragraph in their statement rang alarm bells in my mind, as it mentioned the father of Veruscript's co-founder:

The funding of Veruscript was provided by Andrey Cheglakov, Gleb Cheglakov’s father. He was the initial investor and the company has not required any further rounds of investment to date. Andrey Cheglakov is not involved in running any part of the Veruscript business.

Andrey Cheglakov is a Russian billionaire. According to the follow-up article in Financial Times, "Andrei Cheglakov is a senior executive at Russian national telecoms company Rostelecom and owns companies that design computer software for the Russian government."

From everything that I know, billionaires in Russia tend to be close friends of Putin. Of course, there is a non-zero chance that Andrey Cheglakov financed the creation of Veruscript because of a deep personal passion for open access publishing. However, the financial foundation of Veruscript made it harder for me to swallow the founder's claim, "Veruscript was set up to help the research community by providing a fair publishing platform for researchers across academic disciplines."

So I decided to take a closer look. Veruscript's new journal at the center of this controversy is the Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism. It has published a total of 12 articles so far, with the inaugural article being a propaganda piece that blames the West and Ukraine for Putin's incursion into Crimea:

The main conclusion of this paper is that the West’s complacency and ignorance were some of the principal causes of the Ukraine crisis... Growing frustration of the West with the incompetence and corruption of the Ukrainian ruling elite and the failure of the Ukrainian democratic process to fulfil many of its original expectations are further aggravating the situation. Furthermore, the incorporation of Crimea into the Russian economy has been hampered by the blockade maintained not by Ukrainian government forces, but by Ukrainian paramilitaries, a visible minority of which share a neo-Nazi ideology.

That's not just any article in this journal. This article is co-authored by the journal's Editor-in-Chief, Professor Neil Kent of Cambridge University. Apparently Dr. Kent spent a decade, 2002-2012, as a professor in Russia's St Petersburg State Academic Institute. That must have been a cozy decade for Professor Kent as he became a big fan of Russia and its ruler Putin. Here is Professor Kent, after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, in an interview on, Kremlin's chief propaganda vehicle. In this interview, Dr. Kent sounds more like Donald Trump than a Cambridge University professor, blaming the biased Western media with an agenda, questioning the US State Department and military intelligence.

So with the financial backing of Veruscript by a Russian oligarch, with the Editor-in-Chief a huge fan of Putin and Russia, and with pro-Russian content in their journal, Veruscript's founders will have to do a lot more than write angry letters in order to convince people that they are a legitimate and independent publisher.

Original article:

Lenny Teytelman
An open letter to the Scientific Advisory Board of Elysium, the anti-aging supplement company

Dear Members of Elysium's Scientific Advisory Board:

I am a geneticist and have been absolutely fascinated by aging research since 2003. I write to you to ask you to reconsider your participation in the scientific advisory board of Elysium Health, Inc.

The amazing research into the genetics of aging is undermined by a premature rush to consumer pills. Particularly, the reputation of the field is compromised by the association with the supplement industry. As Dr. Derek Lowe just wrote

It [Elysium Health] makes the legitimate research in this field seem a bit less respectable, which isn’t good, and it makes the supplement hawkers seem a bit more respectable by association, and that’s probably not what Elysium was planning on, either.

By lending your names to Elysium Health, you help to give confidence to a supplement pill that has zero evidence of doing anything to delay aging in humans. The supplement industry thrives on evidence-free placebo effects, to the point of generating $25 billion in sales per year. With Elysium prominently featuring each of you on their website, there is a sense of scientific gravitas and anti-aging promise that is unheard of in this industry.

Considering the ease with which supplement producers already take advantage of the consumers with the marketing of placebos, Elysium is in a remarkable position to take such behavior to a new level. With your names backing the company and the natural human quest to delay aging and death, Elysium stands to make billions of dollars. Elysium could make these billions long before there are any data to indicate whether the $50 per month the consumers will spend has any benefit for their health.

I respect each of you as scientists, and I sincerely hope that you will weigh the impact of your affiliation with a rush to market of an anti-aging supplement pill.

Kind regards,

Lenny Teytelman, Ph.D.



The /team page of the Elysium website features each of you prominently.


On the company landing page:


The problem with the nutritional supplements industry:

Original article:

Lenny Teytelman
A bad week for women in physics, and beyond.


So, why has this week been so bad for me and my ladies-of-physics? Where to start… I guess at the beginning of the week.

Tuesday - The Nobel Prize for Physics is announced

Ah, the Nobel Prize. That annual event that sees top people within their discipline honoured and recognised for their contributions to the field. The winners are always people who have done great science. Something truly remarkable, and worthy of note. But, they’re also a very specific type of person. Really, all coming from the same gender.

The Nobel Prize for Physics has been around since 1901. It has, at this stage, been awarded to 203 individuals. Of those 203 individuals, only 2 have been women. 2. Out of 203. That’s fewer than 1% of all awardees. Given that ~20% of Physics PhDs are awarded to women, this is obviously embarrassing. It has now been 53 years since a woman won the Nobel Prize for Physics. The last women to have been awarded one was Maria Goeppert Mayer, back in 1963. Before that, it was Marie Curie even though she actually wasn’t nominated, only her husband was. Pierre Curie was alerted to this fact by panellist Magnus Goesta Mittag-Leffler, and Pierre went on to inform the committee that any Nobel prize for radioactivity that didn’t include his wife would be a tragedy. If it were not for this, we’d probably only ever have had the one woman winning the Physics prize.

So, are there women who should and could win a Nobel Prize in Physics? Yes. There are. For example, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, the woman who discovered the Pulsar. This phenomenal discovery was thought to be worthy of the Nobel, and the prize was awarded for it in 1974. But not to Jocelyn. Instead, it went to her supervisor, Anthony Hewish. A man. In addition to Jocelyn, Slate have compiled a list of awesome female physicists who could, and should, have a Nobel under their belts. Including my personal favourite for the award, Vera Rubin. A pioneering female astronomer, whose observations of the rotation of stars in disk galaxies demonstrated once and for all that the masses of these systems could not be understood via a combination of their baryonic constituents (stars, gas, dust planets etc) and Newtonian gravity. Attempts to explain the physics underlying her observational results led to the theory of dark matter. A Nobel-worthy effort if ever I heard one. But Rubin is now 88. Can she expect to be awarded the Nobel in her lifetime, given the glacial rate at which the prize seems to honour women? At this point, I don’t have much hope that she can. The Nobel Prize for Physics may as well be renamed the Mens Prize for Manly Physics. It’s more than apparent to the women working in my field that it is not something we should deign to aspire to.

Wednesday - A paper arrives on the arXiv that discusses success rates for telescope proposal

On Wednesday, an analysis of over 13000 applications for time on European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes in the past 8 years, landed on the arXiv. The paper was authored by Ferdinando Patat, who has done an excellent job of determining the likelihood of being successfully awarded time with ESO, based on your career level and gender. In general, the more senior the principle investigator (PI), the more likely the proposal is to succeed. And, if you’re a man, you have a 30% higher likelihood of getting your proposal accepted than a woman. As a woman who requires telescope time to do her research, this is something of a crushing blow to my confidence. Perhaps I’ll submit all my proposals under the name ‘Michael Collins’ from now on…

Such biases (both in career level and gender) have been seen at other telescopes before. The Hubble Space Telescope also published a report a while back, showing systematic biases against female PIs. This year, in an effort to combat these types of biases, HST have taken a proactive step to try to reduce these biases. They've moved to a system where all the authors of a proposal are listed alphabetically, so the identity of the PI is not known. It will be interesting to see how these biases are affected by this change, although we’ll likely need a few years data to say anything significant.

Friday - A Guardian article on the scale of sexual harassment and assault in academia is published

The Guardian have been investigating sexual abuse in Universities, no doubt as a result of several high-profile stories of sexual harassment in astronomy, physics and other areas. After a general request to hear from women who had experienced sexual harassment in UK Universities, more than 100 women responded with their stories. Some likened the scale to that of “scandals involving the Catholic church and Jimmy Savile”. And, from personal conversations with women throughout the sciences, I don’t doubt that these 100 stories are the tip of the iceberg.

It’s not just the numbers of women targeted that is shocking. It’s also the consequences (or lack thereof) for the perpetrators. Would Geoff Marcy have resigned his position without the pressure from Buzzfeed, who broke the story? Berkeley certainly had no intention of firing him. Even when women are brave enough to come forward and talk about their experiences (such as the 3 female astronomers who recently spoke with CNN), often nothing is done to tackle the problem. In the US, Representative Jackie Speier is trying to introduce a bill that would “require colleges and universities to report all substantiated findings of sexual assault and harassment by professors to every federal agency that has awarded the institution competitive research and development grants in the past 10 years”. With such reporting, funding for these known harassers could be withheld. And abusers would not be able to just quietly disappear from their current university, and set up shop in another institute, with the people there having no idea of their past crimes. It would perhaps do much to prevent this type of harassment continuing in academia.

Also Friday - Trump

I mean… do I need to say more? The man is a racist, misogynist, ableist butt-head. So I can’t say I was surprised to learn he’d been boasting about sexually assaulting women. Nor to hear him defend it as just a bit of locker room banter. And I’m pleased to see that this - finally - might be the thing that undoes him. I just wish the line of what is acceptable to hear coming out of the mouth of a person who is vying to become the President of the United States could have been drawn much earlier. Say, when he called Mexican’s rapists. Or when he threatened to ban all Muslims from the US. Or any of the other inexcusable things he has said and done over the course of his campaign.

One of the results of this latest Trump debacle was the appearance of the #YesSheHas hashtag on Twitter, where women shared their stories of being assualted by men in the style described by Trump. The scale of such behaviour is clear. And it should not be tolerated.

So, that’s it. My week as a woman in physics, and the world generally. Here’s hoping the next one goes a little better. I guess, if nothing else, I’ve at least learned to always keep my lady parts more than an arms-length away from Trump. Every day’s a school day and all.

Original article:

Michelle Collins
Quantitative Analysis of Neo-Nazis Supporting Trump and Clinton


In May, the conservative National Review published Trump’s Anti-Semitic Supporters. In June, House Speaker Paul Ryan accused Donald Trump of "textbook racism" over Trump's attacks on a federal judge with Mexican roots. These are just a few of the myriad of media stories about Trump's racism, xenophobia, and consistently strong support from anti-Semites and Neo-Nazis. Just yesterday, Trump's Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner wrote a long letter attempting to defend Trump in light of the most recent anti-Semitic tweeting from the weekend. Kushner starts his letter with a simple, "My father-in-law is not an anti-Semite." He then provides arguments such as:



This notion that has emerged that holds my father in law responsible for the views of everyone who supports him is frankly absurd. Not only is this expectation completely unique to Donald Trump, but it’s clear how easily it could be used to manipulate the public.

The above is a typical defense of Donald Trump - blame the media for making a story where none exists, blame political correctness, blame political bias of liberals in creating a fake image of a race-baiting and Neo-Nazi welcoming Trump. The argument is that some extremists support Trump, some support Clinton, and furor over Führer-lovers also loving Trump is just guilt by association.

To determine whether Trump is being treated unfairly by the media and is getting undue attention over the same handful of extremists supporting him as Clinton, I performed an analysis of Neo-Nazis on Twitter, comparing how many support Donald Trump and how many support Hilary Clinton.


I analyzed 32,069 followers of Neo-Nazi twitter accounts AryanSuperior (1852 followers), David Duke (11,037 followers), WhiteGenocideTM (6,138 followers), and TruthWillOut (13,042 followers). For each account, I made a list of the total followers that mention Trump or Clinton (Figure1).

Figure1. Total count of followers for each Twitter account with account name or description mentioning Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton.

The counts for each of the above accounts are as follows:

AryanSuperior: 39 for Trump, 0 for Clinton

David Duke: 640 for Trump, 13 for Clinton

TruthWillOut: 347 for Trump, 13 for Clinton

WhiteGenocide: 1080 for Trump, 21 for Clinton.

Of course, not all followers of the above accounts are Neo-Nazis. However, manual review of the tweets of the followers of the above suggests that 98%-99% of them are white supremacists. Moreover, checking the tweets of a random subset of the followers suggests that virtually all of them support Trump over Clinton, even if they do not formally mention "Trump" in their account handle or description.  Manual review of the individual followers who matched "Clinton" suggests that none of them actually support Hilary Clinton.


Analysis of thousands of followers of Neo-Nazi twitter accounts shows that 2%-18% explicitly highlight their support of Donald Trump in their Twitter profiles and handles. In contrast, 0% of these followers support Hilary Clinton.


Jared Kushner and other Trump supporters may think that Trump is not a racist or an anti-Semite, and it may be that Trump is not. However, that does not explain the overwhelming support Donald Trump enjoys from the Neo-Nazi community and the total absence of such extremists for Hilary Clinton. It is reasonable to assume that whether Donald Trump is racist or not, the consistently anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-immigrant, and anti-Hispanic rhetoric from him are directly contributing to the enthusiastic embrace of his candidacy by racists and Neo-Nazis.



The processed lists of Trump-mentioning and Clinton-mentioning followers of the above Twitter accounts are available here. For each of the four Neo-Nazi Twitter accounts (AryanSuperior, DrDavidDuke, TruthWillOut, WhiteGenocideTM), the following steps were performed (DavidDuke example):

1. Open the DrDavidDuke Twitter account in Firefox.

2. Place a weight on the "down" arrow key to scroll down and load all of the followers of the given account.

3. Save the page of followers as a "duke.txt" file.

4. Use "" to parse the list of followers and extract the account name, URL/handle, and description into a tab-delimited text file.

cat duke.txt | perl > duke_parsed.txt

5. egrep -i "trump | donald" parsed_duke.txt > fortrump_parsed_duke.txt

6. egrep -i "hilary | clinton" parsed_duke.txt > forclinton_parsed_duke.txt

7. wc fortrump*

Original article:

Lenny Teytelman
What men can and should do about the awful academic sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment in academia is pervasive and scandalously tolerated by administrations across universities. There is a reason Congress is now looking at sexual harassment in academia. Representative Jackie Speier said in her comments regarding academic sexual harassment on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 12, 2016:

Mr. Speaker, some universities protect predatory professors with slaps on the wrist and secrecy, just like the Catholic Church sheltered child-molesting priests for many decades...


In some ways, the situation is reminiscent of the Catholic Church's coddling of child-molesting priests. As in the Church, universities protect perpetuators with slap-on-the-wrist punishment and secrecy, while victims are left alone to try to put their academic careers and lives back together. One peer-reviewed study found that over a quarter of women surveyed (and 6% of men) have been sexually assaulted while conducting scientific fieldwork, and 71% of women and 41% of men also reported that they were sexually harassed.

Professor Julie Libarkin is keeping a depressing list of documented cases of sexual harassment in academia. It's growing constantly: was 372 a week ago, is 374 today, and should be 375 given this week's report on Michael Katze. Professor Libarkin is certain that this list is incomplete - it's just her doing searches in the evenings, after a long day at work, trying to find all reported-on cases. The truly heartbreaking part is that the list of document cases is just a tiny fraction of the total number of sexual harassers at colleges and universities.

Most cases involving faculty go unreported precisely because our institutions routinely protect the powerful professors and our entire system tends to only punish further the victims who do speak up. There are a million reasons for the victims and junior academics to say nothing against the senior academics who are guilty of sexual harassment. Moreover, even I feel powerless to do anything about the professors I personally know about. The universities and their departments protect them. I have told journalists, but they can't do anything because the victims and junior scientists who know about the cases refuse to speak to the media, even anonymously - afraid of repercussions. I can't blog the harassers' names because I will be sued.

There is an overwhelming feeling of desperation and powerlessness, and I'm not even the victim or someone whose career can be jeopardized by speaking out. So, I did a very simple thing yesterday. I took Azeen Ghorayshi's “He Thinks He’s Untouchable” about Michael Katze and e-mailed it to the professors that I know are established sexual harassers. A very simple, "I think you will find this article about sexual harassment in academia of interest..." or "In case you missed this..." will suffice, and you are not formally accusing the faculty of anything; you're just sharing relevant news stories.

Of course, not everyone can do this, even if you are a man and a tenured established professor. However, one thing we can all do when new stories of academic sexual harassment appear in the media is share them with our colleagues, post them on Facebook/Twitter, and strongly condemn in public the harassers and the universities and administrators protecting them. It is important to signal to the harassers that this is no minor issue and to set up clear expectations of the appropriate response to such disasters.

Original article:

Lenny Teytelman
Looking for the scientist's spouse?

Leslie Vosshal noticed yesterday that when you search for a woman scientist, Google seems to often predict that it's their spouse you really want to read about.

Matt Davis noted that the same often happens when you search for famous men.

This made me curious and I decided to check the Google suggestions for the first 50 women listed on the HHMI site, comparing to the first 50 HHMI men. (Yes, I did that late on a Friday night. No, in retrospect, it was not the most riveting experience. At least, with kids asleep and the wife at a conference, I wasn't being anti-social.)

One of the four Google suggestions was "husband" for 3/50 women. For the men, Google recommended "wife" for 2/50 scientists. So, it appears that the spouse search auto-completion isn't very common, and it may not be all that different for men versus women. 


HHMI Women:

Name Spouse in GoogleHint?
Susan Ackerman
Kristi Anseth
Tania Baker
Cornelia Bargmann
Bonnie Bassler
Dominique Bergmann
Carolyn Bertozzi
Sangeeta Bhatia yes
Sue Biggins
Olga Boudker
Linda Buck
Constance Cepko
Jue Chen
Xuemei Chen
Vivian Cheung
Joanne Chory
Yang Dan
Abby Dernburg
Xinnian Dong
Jennifer Doudna yes
Catherine Drennan
Cahterine Dulac
Elizabeth Engle
Susan Ferror-Novick
Elaine Fuchs
Britt Glaunsinger
Helen Hobbs
Hopi Hoekstra yes
Lora Hooper
Akiko Iwasaki
Christine Jacobs-Wagner
Lily Jan
Yishi Jin
Leemor Joshua-tor
Dorothee Kern
Judith Kimble
Nicole King
Jeannie Lee
Ruth Lehmann
Beth Levine
Susan Lindquist
Karolin Luger
Philippa Marrack
Barbara Meyer
Melissa Moore
Dianne Newman
Eva Nogales
Kim Orth
Tanya Paull


Name Spouse in GoogleHint?
David Agard
Paul Ahlquist
Frederick Alt
David Anderson
Richard Axel yes
David Baker
James Bardwell
David Bartel
Peter Baumann
Philip Beachy
Stephen Bell
Hugo Bellen
Philip Benfey
Vann Bennett
Paul Bieniasz
Gunter Blobel
Squire Booker
Michael Brainard
Ronald Breaker
Carlos Brody
Axel Brunger
Carlos Bustamante
Bradley Cairns
Andrew Camilli
Kevin Campbell
Jean-Laurent Casanova
Thomas Cech
Christopher Chang
Edwin Chapman
Zhijian Chen
Yifan Cheng
Arul Chinnaiyan
David Clapham
Adam Cohen
David Corey
Geral Crabtree
Peter Cresswell
Jason Cyster
George Daley
Jeffery Dangl
Robert Darnell
Mark Davis
Roger Davis
Pietro De Camilli
Edward De Robertis
Karl Deisseroth yes
Joseph DeRisi
Raymond Deshaies
Harry Dietz

Original article:

Lenny Teytelman
Reacting to the overtime rule changes for postdocs and technicians

Almost a year ago, Justin Kiggins wrote on our Spectroscope: Postdocs will be getting a raise. He discussed that Obama's proposed changes to overtime compensation would likely include postdocs. Nature covered this and there was active blogger and Twitter discussion around this (see here, here, and here for some heated discussions).

Alas, somehow the director of NIH Francis Collins seems to have missed this. So now that the proposed changes are becoming the rule, he writes in Fair Pay for Postdocs: Why We Support New Federal Overtime Rules:

While supporting the increased salaries will no doubt present financial challenges to NIH and the rest of the U.S. biomedical research enterprise, we plan to work closely with leaders in the postdoc and research communities to find creative solutions to ensure a smooth transition.

One might have imagined that NIH and others would have been working over the past year to find these solutions, but that doesn't appear to have been the case. Hence, understandably, there is a lot of anxiety among faculty in terms of what this means. Professors have a lot of legitimate questions on how to respond to this.

As faculty react and discuss this, many are making the mistake of saying "But postdocs/labtechs are training like graduate students, why should I pay overtime"?  If you are thinking along these lines, please read, Technicians are not grad students in training. Also, a quick reminder:

  • Technicians are not graduate students
  • Graduate students are not technicians
  • Postdocs are not graduate students

Original article:

Lenny Teytelman
Whatever the size, when schools act unethically, it's a problem. We can and should shame them, without punching down.

RetractionWatch reported yesterday about a bizarre press release from Penn College: College retracts press release about sociologist reviewing manuscript.

In the press release, the college was explicit regarding the title of the paper under review in the journal Contemporary South Asia. The journal is published by Taylor and Francis, and it is clear that their peer review is expected to be anonymous, "All research articles in this journal have undergone rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymized refereeing by referees."

I am a strong advocate of open and transparent peer review. However, until we get there, if you submit to a journal that promises anonymous peer review, you have every right to expect that this is the case. Otherwise, thanks to the press release above, everyone knows if the paper was rejected. Penn College clearly knows the press release is inappropriate because they retracted it.

Unfortunately, the above press release is no isolated incident. Quick search shows a plethora of such disturbing announcements.

I took part on an NSF panel within the past year. We were all reminded countless times that this is strictly confidential. Reviewers for NSF cannot mention the date, place, or name of the track for which they served. The confidentiality rules vary by agency, and the NIH is open about members of the study sections (see note below). I am not sure about the other agencies mentioned in Penn College press releases, but given their lack of attention to such details, I doubt they are looking up the specific confidentiality expectations.

I know that serving as a peer reviewer for journals, conferences, and grant study sections is an academic service. The faculty who serve on NSF panels request letters to submit to their university as part of their annual activity reports. Such service counts towards tenure and promotion. My guess is that the Penn College is channeling these reports from faculty directly to the press office. If this is the case, it's unethical and harmful.

There were many social media comments regarding this yesterday. Many made fun of the college and the individual faculty; some of the tweets were downright mean and derogatory. That's wrong and misguided. The conduct of the press office at Penn College in no way reflects on the academic rigur of the faculty. However, let's be clear - Penn College being a non-R1 institution does not excuse unethical behavior by the press office. Retraction Watch was right to report on this. The press office behavior is inexcusable, but we should make sure to make fun of it and criticize it without being demeaning to the school and its faculty.


[Note 5/6/2016] Originally, I wrote, "Reviewers for NSF cannot mention the date, place, or name of the track for which they served. I strongly suspect the same is true for the NIH, but the press release above gives explicit information on the particular study section in which Professor. Yang was to participate." Pat Schloss and Mark Mandel kindly pointed out to me that the NIH study sections are not anonymous. I edited the paragraph to reflect this.

Original article:

Lenny Teytelman
Boldly going to Alpha Centauri?


This ambitious project is the latest to be funded by the new Breakthrough Initiatives scheme, funded by Mark Zuckerburg and Yuri Milner. Last year, they announced $100 million in funding to listen for signs and messages from extra-terrestrial life, by conducting a radio survey of 1,000,000 stars and 100 nearby galaxies. This year, they lined up in New York alongside Cambridge Physicist, Stephen Hawking, to announce their latest venture: a $100 million project to send a space probe to the Alpha Centauri star system inside of a generation. The project is named Starshot, and in a nutshell (which is approriate, given the size of the space probe), it will fire a huge array of powerful, Earth-based lasers at a tiny space probe attached to metre-wide light sails, accelerating the teaspoon-sized nanocraft to a speed of 100 million miles per hour. This relativistic velocity means we could see Starshot arriving at our interstellar neighbour within 20 years of launch.

Once Starshot arrives, it's onboard cameras and scientific equipment would snap a bunch of pictures, and take a bunch of data, and send it back to us (a process which will take 5 years) all while whizzing past the system at 100 million miles per hour (there's no slowing it down once it gets there). In that respect, it's something like an interstellar New Horizons mission. That Pluto fly-by mission only had to travel 3 billion miles, but even that took 9 years. At the size of a baby grand piano, New Horizons is much more massive than the proposed Starshot probe, which will only weigh a couple of grams, making it 'simpler' to accelerate to the ridiculously large velocities required for a beyond-the-solar-system mission.

So far, so very exciting! But, how feasible is this in practice? I mean, we're talking about making huge leaps and bounds in current technology if this interstellar dream is to become a reality. There have been a few nice articles written that scrutinise some of these issues, such as this Forbes piece, and Rachel Feltman's WaPo article. The main issues? Well, for a start, it's going to cost significantly more than $100 million to bring such an ambitious project to fruition. But, that's ok. The Breakthrough Initiative is largely aiming to fund the research into making the technological leaps necessary. And the main challenges faced are:

1) Building a BIG ASS LASER ARRAY, capable of pumping out a burst of energy equivalent to 100 gigawatts in 2 minutes, to propel the nanocraft to the necessary, record breaking speeds required. As the Forbes article points out, that's about 10% of the U.S. midday total energy demand. In the event that these lasers go ahead, you might want to power down your computer while they're being fired, in case of a blackout :)

2) Making a TINY ASS NANOCRAFT. The little wafer-craft that Breakthrough are planning on building will require that Moore's Law (the idea that computer processing power doubles every year) continues to remain true for another decade, at which point fitting everything you need for an awesome space mission into a craft that weighs only a few grams becomes plausible. As Feltman points out in WaPo, it's not certain that this continued improvement in processor power is sustainable. In which case, the nanocraft may yet be decades away.

3) Planning a fly-by to a star 4.76 lightyears away is going to be difficult. At that distance, you basically can't communicate efficiently with your spacecraft. Round-trip communication will take ~ 10 years, which is ~ half your mission. So, unlike New Horizons, you won't be able to change any of your data collecting plans on the fly. Everything will either need to be meticulously pre-planned, or you're going to want some kind of onboard AI that can scan Alpha-Centauri as it approaches the system, and decide what the best way to study it is. So... yeah. TRICKY.

So, realistically, how excited should we be about getting sent images taken around another star within our lifetimes? Forbes reckons it will be at least 2060 before such an ambitous mission delivers the goods, by which time I'll be approaching 80. But, even if it takes longer, and I never get to see a bunch of pictures of smiley-faced (or pitch-fork-wielding) Alpha-Centurians, I'm still excited. This kind of blue-sky-thinking, exploration-minded initiative is bound to push forward a bunch of different technologies that will change our everyday lives, and probably help us do more amazing science within our own little solar system. So, I look forward to seeing what comes from Starshot. It could be anything... ;)

Original article:

Michelle Collins
3-D, without glasses

One of the real challenges to teaching and understanding development is the mental gymnastics needed to understand what's happening in three dimensions when only 2 dimensions are available for viewing using a microscope.  

Wow! This video does an amazing job of bringing the third dimension to life:

Original article:

Jacob Mayfield
What is the ethical compensation for nonprofit executives? (Should you boycott PLOS?)

Over the last week, there's been a storm over the executive compensation and financials at the Public Library of Science (PLOS). It was started by a series of tweets from Professor Andrew Kern, looking into the financial disclosures of PLOS and learning that they pay good salaries and have operating margins. Andrew then concluded:

PLOS's financials reveal that they are merely trying to maximize their personal and corporate profit, like any company. They are padding the wallets of their executives and taking our grant money and putting in in the stock market. They are merely another Nature or Science that aims to maximize profits while cloaking itself in the white robes of OA.

Not surprisingly, many scientists were outraged and accused PLOS of being evil. I was puzzled by the strong negative reaction to the fact that PLOS pays the people who work for it competitive salaries. Clearly, many academics were shocked to learn that six figure salaries are normal for executives of large nonprofits. It doesn't seem "fair" to many. So, I asked:

Simple question to Andrew Kern and all upset with PLOS salaries - if YOU were on the board of PLOS, how would YOU set exec salaries? (No doubt there's been corrosive excessive growth of CEO salaries for decades now. But for a given organization that you want to see succeed, given market executive salaries, what would YOU do?

The are many who replied to me. It was a good discussion. But the concerete answers to my question were of the type: 

Let's pick one of them - Andy Kern's maximum of "5x of graduate stipend". That's about 5*$30,000 = $150,000/year. So if Andy ran PLOS, he would pay the executives at most $150K, and that means Andy would simply run PLOS into the ground because he would lose all the talented executives. And since Andy is an advocate for open access, I don't understand why he would want to destroy PLOS. Sure, he says that executives who would leave are simply "not into the mission," so good riddance. 

But, I am genuinely puzzled over how people who support the push for open access can simultaneously advocate for the destruction of PLOS. Looking at 990 forms of other societies, it quickly becomes clear that the executives at PLOS have competitive but not at all obscene compensation. Quick check, comparing salaries from 990 forms at PLOS, ACS, AAAS.

Those are comparisons to other large non-profits. How much lower can PLOS go in paying its executives before they leave to be publishers at other nonprofit societies or to Elsevier/Wiley/Springer?

While much of the outrage was centered around the salaries, some people were upset that PLOS has margins and savings. Again, this seems to stem from the misunderstanding of how nonprofits work. All successful societies have operating margins and reserves. In fact, as Michael Eisen writes, most scientific societies have larger "assets to expenses" ratios than PLOS.

So my plea to everyone who is outraged by PLOS finances and threatening to boycott publishing there - please think about the above as though you are running PLOS and want open access to succeed. Remember that when it comes to publishing, many societies are making $5K-$6K per published paper, from combination of subscriptions and publishing charges. These societies have often 30%-50% margins on the publishing, compared to the 20% at PLOS. And at the end, the papers are locked behind subscription paywalls.



Randy Olson was one of the people upset by the high salaries. Instead of answering my question of what he would pay, he replied that what bothers him most is that PLOS isn't trying to make publishing cheaper. And that's another puzzle. First of all, PLOS already made publishing cheaper at ~2K/paper instead of the average $6K that subscription publishers get. Second, it's clear that PLOS is investing the extra capital into infrastructure, and I imagine the goal of this is exactly to lower the publishing costs. After all, PLOS has to compete with PeerJ, F1000 Research, and a sea of other open access journals. Because PLOS pays its employees well and has devoted and talented folks, I'm sure they are keenly aware of the need to reduce the publication charges.

Original article:

Lenny Teytelman
When good nonprofits collide: the battle between Open Access and Academic Societies

Many academic societies do wonderful things for science, scientists, and society. They advocate, educate, support trainees, organize productive conferences, act as publishers whose goal is to improve rather than reject any given paper. As a geneticist, I have attended many of the GSA’s yeast conferences since 2003, and they were always a highlight of my academic training. The GSA was and continues to be an early and key supporter of our startup. I am a big fan of Stefano Bertuzzi, the head of the ASCB, and I worship ASCB’s career improvement workshops at the annual Cell Biology conference. I am also volunteering for the SSE’s diverse careers task force to bring ASCB-like career mentorship to the Evolution conference. I am a track chair for the 2017 SLAS conference.

I am a big fan of academic societies. I am also a big fan of PLOS and open access. As such, I find myself torn between entities that are fundamentally at odds with each other. The societies are threatened by open access and many senior scientists detest PLOS and PLOS ONE for “sucking up all oxygen and undermining society journals.” The problem is that for many societies, the majority of their revenue comes from subscription publishing, and PLOS and open access are a real threat to the financial sustainability of these societies.

As I converse with editors and executive members of these societies, we often start with a general argument over open access. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have heard “almost everyone who needs access has it; subscription paywalls really don’t hurt anyone.” I push back strongly against this, because this line is deeply flawed. And then, invariably, we end up at “But our society journal cannot go open access. We would need to charge $4,000-$5,000 for each paper, and we could never compete with PLOS ONE and the other PLOS journals in that case. But unlike PLOS, our society does a lot of good for scientists.”

I can write pages and pages on the good that PLOS has done for science and society. But instead, I want to focus on a simple argument – if scientists won’t pay $5,000 per paper to publish with you, you are charging too much. Open Access publishing model brings this cost to light, and scientist rebel. Subscriptions hide the cost to everyone except the librarians, propping up the 30%-40% profit margins that Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and many professional society journals enjoy.

I cannot accept the argument that because societies do a lot of good, charging $5,000 for a paper with a 40% profit margin, is somehow justified. Paywalls to research hurt scientists and non-scientists alike. They hurt patients, journalists, teachers, academics who are not at elite institutions. The Gates foundation is right to require OA-only publishing starting in 2017 from all scientists funded by its grants.

To argue that societies do good, hence we shouldn’t move to OA and we should continue to pay exorbitant fees to publish and access the research papers – that is like arguing that because medical schools do a lot of good in education, it’s acceptable for hospitals to overcharge patients. It is not. I worry about the academic societies because they do provide a valuable service. I worry that many of them might evaporate over the next 10-20 years because publishing will become entirely open access. I hope the societies can find alternative sustainable revenue sources. But I aggressively reject the argument that we need to prop up subscription publishing for the good of academic societies.


Note: I am not making an argument that the society journals are not useful. Many of these journals are good communities that serve their fields well. They care deeply about improving science and they review to improve the papers and the science in them. As I recently wrote, there is a lot of important work that a good journal does. I do not want society journals to die. I want them to switch to open access and for their societies to figure out how to be sustainable without overcharging for the publishing work.

Original article:

Lenny Teytelman
Want to "Make America Great Again"? Hire immigrant scientists and let them stay.

This was originally inspired by the blog post here on 1st generation immigrants who are invaluable for lab research.

None of the current GOP candidates offer specific support for legal immigration, especially for highly skilled workers, and Donald Trump is particularly vocal against H1B visas. (Democrats don’t have a stellar track record either.) You know who else is on these visas? A very large proportion of international postdocs and non-academic scientists who haven’t been as lucky as me to get a green card before graduation. 

My own experience lies with the “0th generation” immigrants in STEM, so that's who I'm writing about here: those who came in, legally, as undergrads, or graduate students, or postdocs, for a chance to participate in top-notch research - in American labs and for the ultimate benefit of the American public. 

If such immigrants want to stay in science after graduation, they need either a J1 or an H1B appointment in academia, and an H1B in industry. And H1Bs have quotas. This means, even after the most prestigious institutions in the world put $200K into your education, and even after you lived here for 4-10 years as a model, tax-paying, law-abiding resident alien (yes, that’s the official title) your dream of being a scientist might be cut off halfway through achieving it. More importantly for the rest of the country, you might not be able to return its investment in you by doing research and teaching the next generations of students. It should not be a partisan issue either: whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, if you care about the US staying competitive in science and technology, spending time and money on training people only to kick them out afterwards is simply a bad business model. 

I came to the US at 19 without knowing a single person in the country, with $500 to my name. All I dreamed about was science. Luckily, Harvard took a chance on me and gave me full financial aid and a fellowship that let me work in a lab. Later Stanford offered a private grant to cover my first years as a PhD student. They gave me a chance - and I will gladly spend the rest of my life paying it back. How many immigrants are still waiting for such a chance? How many immigrant students have actual, literal nightmares of calling a country their home for 10 years and then being forced out of it? And what kind of reasoning is considering me more worthy of a green card status just because I married an American, and not because of my extensive scientific and technical skills and education?

Your typical STEM immigrant is probably someone you'd like to hire. In fact, a large number of tech companies do, and even more would if the immigration process were simplified and made less expensive. After all, being a 0th generation immigrant in STEM means leaving behind your family, country and the entire emotional/social safety net, figuring out the system of getting into science in a completely different culture, all of it in a foreign language and all of it often contingent upon acquiring financial support. It means hard life choices and long hours and fierce competition and knowing that you cannot afford to fail a class or spend time figuring out what you want to do with yourself. It means not being eligible for most funding sources and many jobs, and doggedly trying to make your way in spite of that, basically by becoming so good that you can’t be ignored. If that doesn't breed determination and responsibility, I don't know what does. 

I am an immigrant. So is my lab professor. So was his professor. So is 50% of my lab – all of us working to find treatments for multiple sclerosis. So are countless scientists trying to cure diseases, launch rockets, invent a hundred new flavors of breakfast cereal, explore the wonder of the universe. We are already here, legally, supported by universities and companies that value us enough to pay our salaries. We come in a spectrum of skin tones and accents and creeds and political affiliations. We are working on extending American lifespan and putting Americans on Mars and teaching American students and volunteering to bring science to American neighborhoods. And all we ask for is a chance to work on discoveries and inventions that would make America great again.

Thank you to Twitter users @drugmonkeyblog and @McLNeuro whose excellent blog posts and comments inspired me to write this. Participate in the discussion on #ImmigrantInSTEM.

Original article:

Egle Cekanaviciute