Science for Progress

Science Communication is one way academics can apply themselves outside of academia. But how does one transition between careers? I talked with Dr. Deboki Chakravarti, a biomedical engineer who worked on cancer treatments. She graduated in 2018 and then did an internship with Scientific American, a leading brand in Science Communication in the USA.

First we learn a little bit about her scientific work, and her personal experiences in graduate school. Already during graduate school she began a YouTube channel about books and life as a graduate student. She then shares why she decided to leave academia, and she explains how she managed to find an internship with Scientific American. And finally, she explains what the internship looks like.

Dr. Deboki Chakravarti worked on ways to increase the control practitioners have over so called “CAR t-cells”. T-cells are immune cells that use receptor molecules to detect specific proteins on the surface of unwanted cells.  CAR stands for “chimeric antigen receptors”, receptor molecules that were designed by scientists to recognize specific cells. When scientists equip t-cells with these special “CAR” molecules, they can detect cancer cells.

Specifically engineered immune cells are necessary, because the patient’s immune system has a hard time recognizing cancer cells. This is because cancer grows out of the patient’s own body cells and tumors carry much of the same markers as healthy body cells.

Deboki uses her YouTube Channel to talk about books, but also about her experience as a PhD student. The friends Deboki made in grad school have been some of the most supportive people she met. She experienced grad school as very isolating experience, and she realized that her friends felt the same way. Sharing their feelings and experiences helped Deboki and her friends deal with the stress in graduate school.

On YouTube Deboki realized that the people who followed her for her book reviews, also became interested in her personal life. So, when she began to add videos talking about her PhD experience, these were greeted with interest, too. And other PhDs and PhD students related greatly with these videos.

Deboki comes from a family of academics and going to some kind of extra school after college seemed the normal thing to do. She also wanted to do research. However, during her PhD she realized that she did not want to follow an academic career.

She began to apply for jobs and internships in Science Communication for almost a year before she graduated. This way she had time to learn how this process works in this area. She sent applications for a wide range of jobs at first, and through this process learned enough to narrow her search down and go specifically for an internship.

After sending in her cover letters, resumes and portfolio to many places, she was invited to interviews by some of them. These interviews were all by phone or video conferencing. The interviews were focused on why Deboki was interested in doing science communication with video.

Deboki’s portfolio only consisted of her videos. She worried her videos weren’t professional enough, but this was unwarranted. The technical quality of  her work wasn’t the main focus for her interviewers. They were more interested in the combination of skills, being a PhD on one side, and communicating with video on the other side.

She was accepted for an internship with Scientific American where she got to do exciting work. She made explainer videos, helped interview a nobel prize laureate, worked on a podcast for “60 seconds science”, and she learned to do animations.

Deboki had no experience with creating animations prior to this internship. But she found that learning to create animations wasn’t much different from learning to code. Once you have the most basic principles down, the rest is searching for tutorials on the internet.

Another skill she has been honing is writing. While in the past she mostly enjoyed writing essays, she now writes scripts that are supposed to be read out loud and sound natural. For her YouTube videos she can write more freely as her talking is the focus of the video. But for explainer videos, the narration must fit an existing animation.

Deboki addressed diversity issues of academia in one of her videos. She says she doesn’t have enough of an overview, yet, to know whether SciComm was a more diverse community. However, although her YouTube channel is small and doesn’t usually catch the attention of the typical troll, she did already have negative encounters. She fears that when her channel grows she may face the same harassment that other female science YouTubers are already dealing with.

In Science Communication the most important part of being successful is, of course, having and growing an audience. Typically the first people interested in a new science show are other scientists. But Deboki finds that already having an active audience in the book community allowed her to reach non-scientists more easily. She recommends branching out into other communities like this in order to find a wider audience.

I think the most important tips for transitioning from science to science communication were:

Do you have questions, comments or suggestions? Email [email protected], write us on facebook or twitter, or leave us a video message on Skype for dennis.eckmeier.

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sources:
• YouTube Channel Okidokiboki
• Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018
• Women Making Science Videos on YouTube Face Hostile Comments
• Deboki looks back on her internship with Scientific American on Twitter

work Deboki did at Scientific American:
• Video-Stiglitz Interview
• Video-What do honeybees do in winter?
• Podcast-Computerized Chemical Toxicity Prediction Beats Animal Testing

At the end of November 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he had genetically modified human embryos which were then brought to term. The resulting twin sisters appear to be healthy. But this experiment was not greeted with enthusiasm by the scientific community.

The critique attacks every aspect of the experiment: the treatment’s medical necessity, the reasoning behind the treatment approach, the way it was conducted, the ethical implications, and it also wasn’t legal.

He Jiankui was aware that he was doing something the public and the scientific community would not agree with. In order to dampen the fall, He announced his experiments in a series of YouTube videos in which he also attempts an ethical justification. He addressed the public in this way before the scientific community could comment, to frame the following discussion in his favor. Possibly also to force Chinese authorities to act cautiously with the eyes of the world resting on He Jiankui.

After an appearance at a conference in Hong Kong, He Jiankui went missing, and it still seems to be unclear where he is. Some news outlets reported the Dr. He was put under house arrest.

In this episode, Bart Geurten (@BartGeurten) and I (Dennis Eckmeier, @DennisEckmeier) have a conversation about what we understand about what happened. (Recorded Dec 16th, 2018)

He Jiankui is a geneticist who works on genetic alteration of human embryos. In some countries, scientists can get permission to experiment on human embryos when the embryos are just a few cells big. Such embryos, however, may not be allowed to develop into full human beings. The goal of such experiments is, for example, to establish safer methods for gene therapies.

The embryos are created through in-vitro-fertilization, an established practice for couples who are having trouble having healthy babies. Eggs and sperms are brought together outside the woman’s body, and the growing embryos can be tested for possible gene defects. Healthy embryos can then be implanted in the becoming mother’s womb.

But He implanted genetically modified embryos in the womb of a woman, which the scientific community has many problems with. The two embryos have become babies and were born several months before the announcement.

He Jiankui wants to protect children of HIV infected parents from infection, AIDS, and social discrimination that comes with HIV infection.

The medical community, however, does not agree that gene modification would be an appropriate method to accomplish this. There are numerous ways to protect yourself from infection with HIV by following simple rules of caution.

He chose couples where the father is HIV positive, while the mother is not. To protect the mother, such couples can use in vitro fertilization, if they want a child. In the process of IVF, the HIV is removed.

So there was no medical necessity for this treatment. But let’s say there would have been. To genetically protect the children from HIV, He Jiankui attempted to change a gene (CCR5) to a specific variant (delta32) that is believed to play a role in HIV resilience.

But the scientific community agrees that they don’t know enough about the gene’s function. Genes code for proteins, and the same protein may play different roles in different bodily functions. Besides it’s implication in HIV resilience, the delta32 variant of CCR5 seems to be just as likely to increase vulnerability to influenza and the West Nile virus. There seems to be one study that even claims it might play a role in increasing cognitive ability. If the experiment worked, He may have introduced human enhancement which he himself says would be unethical. Or he may have put the girls at an increased risk to die from the flu.

This means that this was a highly risky experiment and He may have done more harm than good to the children.

No, the experiment wasn’t successful. Genes occur several times in the genome. In order for the genetic modifications to be effective, all these copies need to be changed. But this doesn’t seem to have worked. Instead one of the twins will have both variants of the protein expressed in all her cells. The other twin will have cells that will produce either one or the other protein variant.

On top of it, He wasn’t successful in recreating the delta32 version of the gene. He created completely new mutations of the CCR5 gene, and we have no idea what this will mean for the twin girls.

We don’t know. Consent is not a simple issue. There are many ways to nudge someone into signing something. Especially if you are promising future parents a better life for their children while downplaying the risks and experimental nature of an untested therapy. Since He Jiankui went behind the backs of his own institute, and everybody else, really, nobody was there to ensure proper protocol was followed.

Bart and Dennis further share their thoughts about human gene modification in more general terms.

Do you have questions, comments or suggestion? Email [email protected], write us on facebook or twitter, or leave us a video message on Skype for dennis.eckmeier.

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sources:

I talked with Dr. Nuno Henrique Franco about animal welfare in scientific research. The questions we address are

Nuno Franco is an expert on animal wellbeing in scientific research. He works as an assistant researcher at the “Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde” (Institute for Health Investigation and Innovation), or short i3S in Porto, Portugal. He worked on animal welfare, and animal ethics regulation, and he currently coordinates the national network of animal welfare bodies.

Animal research is mostly done in the context of health research. Researchers use animals instead of humans, because human experimentation at this level would be unethical. They also don’t make good study subjects from a practical standpoint. The history of medical research shows that animal research translates well to humans in most cases.

In order to make animal experimentation conduct as humanely as possible, international legislation applies the 3R principle:

When talking about methods to test the toxicity of compounds, animal testing is successfully replaced by animal-free methods. For example by using cells grown in a dish. As soon as they have been validated, these methods can be implemented on a larger scale. This makes them very cost efficient. The development, however, is expensive and it does involve animal experiments.

Animal testing for cosmetics was banned by the EU, and it is further illegal to sell cosmetics for which new tests on animals were conducted. Only compounds used for medical purposes still need to be tested on animals for safety reasons.

When we talk about physiological research, the replacement of experiments by animal-free methods is less feasible. Of course there are – and always have been – animal-free methods which have advantages for specific questions. And often studies are animal free up until the point at which the questions concern the whole animal. Animal-free “in vitro” methods are being further developed. The latest innovations being “organs on a chip”, and “organoids”. Both represent miniature versions of single organs and have some degree of complexity beyond ‘simple’ cell cultures.

I am a neuroscientist, and in neuroscience, “organoids” have been hyped as “mini brains”. This is a crude exaggerations. While they do have neurons connecting to some degree, they are still far from being actual brains. Some researchers even raised the ethical issues of perfecting neuronal organoids to actual “mini brains”. Could such a brain experience suffering? Anyways, in neuroscience, in the end, we need to study the function of the nervous system in the context of animal behavior. And for that, we need the whole living animal.

And this leads us to the final conclusion on the limitations of artificial “in vitro” (cell cultures, organoids, etc) and “in silico” (computer models) methods for studying physiology. In order to recreate the whole physiological system of an animal, and study it, we need to already know everything there is to know about that animal. In other words, we would not need the model anymore.

There is a whole lot. The researcher needs to be licensed, the animal keeping facility needs to be licensed, and the project itself needs to be authorized. This means that everybody involved is trained in the 3Rs, animal handling, husbandry, and surgery. There is always a veterinarian on call, etc. To say it with Nuno’s words “there is a whole ecosystem” in place to ensure that all regulations are being complied with.

So researchers have to justify the use of animals, and they have to classify the severity of a procedure. This classification is difficult, because it’s highly subjective and biased by culture. Efforts are being made to harmonize this assessment. Anyways, a procedure that is finally judged to inflict severe harm for long periods of time will be rejected. In some cases, the authority will retrospectively analyse whether the claimed severity was exceeded, and the promised benefits were achieved. This is done to improve future cost/benefit analysis for approval decisions.

Nuno shared some preliminary results of a side project with us. It appears that researchers actually share the same concerns about animal experimentation as the public. The only difference is that they are more willing to accept the utilitarian argument for the general necessity of animal research.

Most people, once they know the benefits of animal research, agree that animal research is justified. This of course under the condition that everything it is done humanely. Only a small number of people will not accept utilitarian arguments. Such ethical extremists won’t be reached with outreach. However, providing context of the usefulness of animal research is key to increasing acceptance.

The second key element for reaching the public is transparency. Animal researchers are operating based on an implicit social contract with the public. This social contract relies on the trust granted to scientists by the public. But trust needs to be earned. One way to achieve this is to be open about what happens in the laboratories. This is why principal investigators must provide a non-technical summary of their ongoing project. These summaries are available online for the public to read. And there are further new efforts of institutes to be transparent about their procedures.

“We are not angels. There are a few instances when things go wrong, and these people have to be called out and sanctions have to be in order […] and some people should not be working with animals. But overall, I would say, almost all researchers working with animals are compassionate, competent people, and the public has to know that!”

Do you have questions, comments or suggestion? Email [email protected], write us on facebook or twitter, or leave us a video message on Skype for dennis.eckmeier.

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•Dr. Nuno Henrique Franco SfProcur curator profile
•Nuno Franco’s blog
•Sociedade Portuguesa de Ciências em Animais de Laboratório
•EARA – European Animal Research Association
•Transparency Agreement on Animal Research in Portugal
•EU ban on Animal Testing for Cosmetics
•EU news: Testing cosmetics on animals: MEPs call for worldwide ban
•Organoids (wikipedia)
•Lab-grown ‘mini brains’ produce electrical patterns that resemble those of premature babies
•FRAME – independent charity with the ultimate aim of the replacement of animals in medical experiments
•RSPCA – Lab Animals – Working to reduce the use and suffering of animals in research and testing.
•Norecopa – Norway’s national consensus platform for the 3Rs
•The National Centre for the 3Rs – supporting scientists to replace, reduce and refine the use of animals in research in the UK and internationally
•Swiss 3R Competence Centre (3RCC) – Promoting research, education & communication regarding the 3Rs
•Understanding Animal Research

Once a month I sit down with my friend and co-host Bart Geurten. We talk about things within and around academia, and exchange opinions on earlier episodes.

In this episode, we first talk about the concept of overlay journals in the context of the newly founded community based journal “Neurons, Behavior, Data Analysis, and Theory”. NBDT is a journal for computational neuroscience, and it’s community lead, completely free, open, and not for profit.

And in the main section we revisit my interview with Hélène Pidon on GMOs. We talk about the fears we think are behind the anti-GMO sentiments, and why the verdict of the EU court on gene modification was unscientific.

Do you have questions, comments or suggestion? Email [email protected], write us on facebook or twitter, or leave us a video message on Skype for dennis.eckmeier.

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sources:

While the number of PhD graduates per year is rising worldwide, the number of proper long-term or permanent positions in academia isn’t. This leaves PhDs with ever decreasing chances of staying in academia. And it means that increasing numbers PhDs stay postdocs for a decade or longer, only to have to leave after all.

Amanda (center in the picture), Cleyde (left in picture), and Ian (right in picture) are three former life science postdocs who left academia between 2015 and 2017. When transitioning, they felt isolated from their peer groups who were predominantly academics. They found each other on Twitter seeking advice and got to talk about the challenges one faces when switching careers. So they decided to start the Recovering Academic podcast, which just entered its third season.

There is a lot of information about how to write a resume and other more technical advise. The Recovering Academic podcast shares experiences with these practical issues. They speak, for example, about networking and resume writing in their episodes. But what really brought them together was the emotional struggle of leaving the Ivory Tower. So they speak with their guests about the experience of leaving, the reactions of academic peers. The feelings of failure.

This is a “crossover” episode of Recovering Academic and Science for Societal Progress. Besides talking about how Amanda, Cleyde and Ian met and why they decided to create Recovering Academic, I wanted to know what they themselves learned from doing the podcast, and which episode they liked the most. We talked about my story, too, which you can listen to in their version of this episode.

This episode is the first ‘Q&A’ episode, where my new co-host Dr. Bart Geurten (see episode 8) and I talk about what’s new in academia. Our conversations are free form and may lead us astray here and there.

We discuss the concept of ‘merit’ in the natural sciences. And we begin with a quick recap on episode 9, where I talked to Dr. Björn Brembs about the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). The JIF is a metric designed to measure the impact a journal had in the scientific community. There are many problems with how JIFs are generated. What is even worse is the misuse of this metric for estimating the scientific ability of a single author of one article published in a journal.

Bart tells us about how he himself took the news about how the JIF can be influenced by the journals, and the reactions of his colleagues. The omnipresent use of the JIF is guiding the decisions of our generation and it’s not questioned enough. Björn Brembs had mentioned how the reviewers at ‘top’ journals blocked his attempts to publish an article about how the JIF is created. The reviewers claimed that everybody would already know about this. Based on Bart’s experience, and the feedback I received on Twitter, this is definitely not the case. Bart suggests bypassing commercial journals to reach the community through society communications and similar outlets (for example ‘DZG news’, an outlet of the German Zoological Society).

We point out a couple of characteristics which make a successful scientist in our eyes, and talk about the difficulty of measuring these. One metric in use is the Hirsch index, which also uses citations of each single article. In principle, this is one step better than the JIF. But it has it’s own problems, since the potential citations differ widely, for example by accessibility of the paper (open access versus closed access), dissemination on social media, size of the research field the work is directly relevant to, the type of the article (research report, method paper, review article, etc.). And non of these things have anything to do with the abilities of the authors.

What would be merits other than the success of an article? Obviously we didn’t find a solution, but we talk about:

Our advise for early career researchers: Go for high journal impact factor journals, and apply to ALL of the grants and awards.

Apart from that, we think it is important for the scientific community to move away from the JIF and towards new metrics, Open Science, leadership training for postdocs and young principle investigators, and modern team management techniques.

Dr. Hélène Pidon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research. She searches for genes that give plants resistance to diseases. She wants to use these genes to fortify cultivated Barley against these diseases, and thus reduce the amount of pesticides used to grow the plant. When the European Court of Justice ruled on the status of crops modified with gene editing methods like CRISPR, Hélène contacted me to talk with me about GMO crops.

I was curios about the origins of agriculture and how simple artificial selection of nice looking plants affected their genomes.For Millennia, farmers would choose a particular good looking plant to sow it’s seeds in the next season. Unknowingly, they had a major impact on the whole genome of domesticated plants. For example, the size of the wheat genome tripled – a rather drastic modification. Plant scientists often view the cultivated plants as completely new species that can’t reproduce with their wild counterpart. Domesticated crops like these would not be able to survive in the wild and need constant attendance.

With the population boom at the end of the 19th century, farmers needed to outsource their breeding efforts. Companies stepped in producing fertilizers, and pesticides, and also new breeding procedures. Now, specialized breeders would search for plants with valuable traits. These plants they would then cross with the currently used crop plant in order to create a new variety with the new trait. However, if you breed your ‘elite’ plant with another plant, the offspring also inherits many unwanted traits. In order to get back to a plant that has all the traits of the current elite crop, and the additional new one, the plants need to be back crossed with the elite variant many times. This is a very slow and tedious process.

To speed things up, breeders figured that it would be better to increase the variability in the offspring of the elite crop. This way they could simply select an elite crop with new randomly added trait. To do so, breeders use radiation or chemicals to induce a mutation rate that is higher than under natural conditions. This method has been very successful. Today, every major crop has undergone mutagenesis at some point.

Today, latest discoveries in genetics and developments of genetic methods allow to identify the genes underlying the beneficial traits breeders want to add to their crops. With transgenesis scientists have first become able to introduce complete genes into a genome. The source of this gene is irrelevant. So called ‘BT crops’ for example, are transgenic plants that received a bacterial gene that makes them resistant to certain insects. The insecticide these plants produce are proteins that acts very specifically against specific insect species. This allows the farmers to use less insecticides that may not be as specific. While this technique had some problems in the past regarding the positioning of the new gene in the genome, it has been improved greatly since it’s introduction.

The latest advancement in gene modification are gene editing techniques like CRISPR. Here, only a few base pairs are changed in a specific gene to change it’s properties.

It is counter intuitive, but the EU prefers random gene modification with unknown collateral mutations over highly precise minimalist intervention with known outcomes.

Hélène explains her view on this situation covering topics like adaptation of agriculture to climate change, glyphosate, and organic farming.

In contrast to what was promised in the last podcast episode, we don’t have a full question and answer episode this time. I hope this will not happen too often, in future.

First thing is that I quit my postdoctoral fellowship to become a freelancer. You can see how I approach this on my website. Basically I want to offer my skills and expertise in scholarship and neuroscience to help people with their academic writing, be it papers or funding applications.

This means that I am currently a bit low on finances, which makes financing Science for Progress more difficult, of course. More about how you can help me with that further down.

Intersting interview with @brembs about journal impact factors- for people who know about the issues always interesting, for those who don’t even more important! #science #WhatScienceIsImpacting https://t.co/RnQwpajLc5

— Simon Sprecher (@simon_sprecher) 17. September 2018

This is a great comment! Being interesting to people who know about the issue while being important to those who know is pretty much the sweet spot where I want the podcast to be. I hope there will be many more episodes receiving praise like this!

I'm listening to @SciForProgress podcast on impact factor. Everyone should listen at least to the 1st 5 minutes of it. When they say this is known: I did not know! And I've been doing science for 10 years now.

— Science is not Glamorous (@Science_glamour) 29. September 2018

I have been thinking the exact same thing! I knew things weren’t 100% correct with the Journal Impact Factor, but I didn’t know about the details, either! When Björn Brembs says ‘it is known’ he didn’t mean everybody is aware, but that the information is openly available, if you look for it. Which I think most of us don’t!

Well, its wonderfull. As authentic and on spot as everything in the project

— Zé (@93Antidote93) 13. September 2018

What more can I say than that this warms my heart. 😀

As I mentioned further up, I currently do not have a steady income and it may take a while to get there. This is why I need your help to continue investing my time and money into improving and growing Science for Progress activities. For over a year I have created everything you see myself (even the podcast music!), and everything is coming out of my pocket.

At first, I was not 100% convinced Patreon would be the way to go. But after looking into my options, I think this is actually the best solution for us, right now.

I always wanted Science for Progress to be a community with invested and engaged members. I did want to found an association that can raise tax-deductable donations. However, looking into the details of this, I realize I am not currently in a position to found an association. But a Patreon community that I treat like a social business is the next best thing.

A social business does not funnel profits back to their investors but re-invests into the social cause it is working for. For us this means I will use your pledges to invest my time and money into growing and improving Science for Progress outreach. Top priority remains to advance our causes. And yes, this means that if in some Utopian future the pledges rise to cover a full salary and expenses, I would work full-time on Science for Progress.

So the perks I offer to Patreon members won’t take away from our cause. Tier 1 and higher members would get access to a Discord text and voice chat server which I plan to use to hold monthly meetings. Tier 2 members would also get access to a “director’s cut” of the podcast that includes some parts that won’t make it into the final episode – I already uploaded the director’s cut for last episode on Patreon. Higher tier members would for example be mentioned on our website, and at the end of a podcast episode. Things like that. I would actually like to hear from you which kinds of perks you’d like to see for different tiers.

I hope you are as excited about this as I am and consider to Become a Patron!

The Journal Impact Factor is widely used as a tool to evaluate studies, and researchers. It supposedly measures the quality of a journal by scoring how many citations an average article in this journal achieves. Committees making hiring and funding decisions use the ‘JIF’ as an approximation for the quality of the work a researcher has published, and in extension as an approximation for the capabilities of an applicant.

I find this practice already highly questionable. First of all, it appears the formula calculates a statistical mean. However, no article can receive less than 0 citations, while there is no upper limit to citations. Most articles – across all journal – receive only very few citations, and only a few may receive a lot of citations. This means we have a ‘skewed distribution’ when we plot how many papers received how many citations. The statistical mean, however, is not applicable for skewed distributions. Moreover, basic statistics and probability tell us that if you blindly choose one paper from a journal, it is impossible to predict -or even roughly estimate – its quality by the average citation rate, alone. It is further impossible to know the author’s actual contribution to said paper. Thus, we are already stacking three statistical fallacies by applying JIF to evaluate researchers.

But this is just the beginning! Journals don’t have an interest in the Journal Impact Factor as a tool for science evaluation. Their interest is in the advertising effect of the JIF. As we learn from our guest, Dr. Björn Brembs (professor for neurogenetics at University of Regensburg), journals negotiate with the private company Clarivate Analytics (in the past it was Reuters) that provides the numbers. Especially larger publishers have a lot of room to influence the numbers above and below the division line in their favor.

There is one thing the Journal Impact Factor can tell us: how good the reputation of the journal is among researchers. But does that really mean anything substantial? Björn Brembs reviewed a large body of studies that compared different measures of scientific rigor with the impact factor of journals. He finds that in most research fields the impact factor doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the work. In some fields it may even be a predictor of unreliable science! This reflects the tendency of high ranking journals to prefer novelty over quality.

The JIF is omnipresent. A CV (the academic resume) is not only judged by the name of the journals in a publication list. Another factor is the funding a researcher has been able to get. However, funding committees may also use JIF to evaluate whether an applicant is worthy of funding. Another point on a CV is the reputation of the advisers, who were also evaluated by their publications and funding. Another important point on a CV is the reputation of the institute one worked at, which is to some degree evaluated by the publications and the funding of their principle investigators.

It is easy to see how this puts a lot of power into the hands of the editors of high ranking journals. Björn Brembs is concerned about the probable effect this has on the quality of science overall. If the ability to woe editors and write persuasive stories leads to more success than rigorous science, researchers will behave accordingly. And they will also teach their students to put even more emphasis on their editor persuasion skills. Of course not all committees use JIF to determine who gets an interview. But still the best strategy for early career researchers is to put all their efforts into pushing their work into high ranking journals.

We also talk about possible solutions to the problem. In order to replace the JIF with better measures, Björn Brembs suggests to build a universal open science network. Such a network would allow collecting more data on the scientific rigor and skills of a researcher, directly. The money for this could be raised by stopping to buy subscriptions from large publishing houses. Getting rid of the JIF and moving to open access publishing using private publishers, however, would only shift the problem. High reputation journals would ask for higher submission fees from authors than lower ranking journals. So, instead of using the JIF, committees would judge applicants by the amount of funds they were able to invest in publishing. It would also not solve the problem of researchers trying to persuade editors rather than do rigorous research. But now scientific results of deteriorating quality would be openly accessible by a lay readership, which would be a disservice to the public. In the long run, we need to get rid of journals, completely. One step in the right direction could be something like SciELO, a publicly funded infrastructure for open access publishing in South America.

In the meanwhile, and this may come as a surprise, Björn Brembs suggests to stop having committees evaluating researchers at all. There is evidence, he says, that people will always have unjustified biases against women or institutes of lower reputation. So he suggests, once a short list of applications has been selected based on the soundness of the research proposal, funding should be distributed using a lottery system. The evidence tells us that as long as we don’t have a real, objective measure, a random selection is our best option.

•Björn Brembs’ blog

Science compensates for the shortcomings of human cognition. It allows us to apply methods of investigation that are independent of our own subjective notions and irrationality. As a result we have overcome common sense, traditional beliefs, and other misconceptions through thorough investigation. We even describe and utilize phenomena that are as incomprehensible as quantum mechanics, which defies our everyday experience in unimaginable ways.

There is, however, a real struggle, here. Just like our brain perceives the non-existent ‘Kanizsa’s Triangle’ (picture on the left), we make certain identifiable mistakes in cognitive thinking, too. This can really impact the way science is conducted and results are interpreted. Because of this it usually takes whole communities of scientists to work out and refine scientific theories.

In this episode, I talk about heuristics and cognitive biases in science and society with neuroscientist Dr. Bart Geurten. Bart is no cognitive scientist. He works on motion vision and locomotion in fruit flies. But coming across the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on Prospect Theory, he decided to discuss cognitive biases with students in a seminar at the University of Göttingen (Germany).

When I asked Bart to record this episode, we were in a campervan on a highway in Australia. It was the middle of the night, we were both sleep deprived and jetlagged, and he was having near death experiences because … well, I don’t usually drive on the wrong side of the road. These are the lengths we went for this podcast, so I hope you all appreciate this!

Most of what we discussed can be found in Daniel Kahneman’s famous book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow‘. I wikipedia-ed most of the topics for you:

Correction: The unusual series of roulette results occurred in Monaco, not Macao.