I’m like you- I am very free with ideas and unpublished data. I’m sure I’ll develop some caution over the years. I have had some odd experiences with this that I intended to post on today- but something else got in the way.

Maybe tomorrow…

I hope never. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you’re burned, as long as you can survive and keep doing the research right? I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you. I don’t think you’re the loudmouth I know, but he’s thriving.

HA! Sounds like me. The spouting off part anyway. although most of this is because for a very long time I was not really in danger of scoopage. Interestingly I find that people have been moving in on topics that I’ve been working on more and more as time goes by. I wonder how many times it will take me getting burned before I turn into one o’ them paranoid secretive scientist types?

Yes, it is limited time – but 6 years long… you would think there would be more than 3 at the assistant professor level (at least I would). I wonder why from those 8 high powered labs more people aren’t coming out into faculty positions.

But I think you quite rightly put your finger on the generosity/or lack thereof of the senior faculty in the field. The success of younger faculty depends on them. After all, you can have all the self-starting nature, bright ideas, great oral/written communication skills etc… talents you need as a post-doc, but you won’t get a jr. faculty position without the help of senior faculty, and you won’t get a grant without them either. Just a reality at this moment.

If it’s as top-heavy as this suggests, though, it would suggest that the field is dying, unless you’re in a special special sub-specialty where people live forever.

But, you do bring up something I’ve thought about a lot — there are fields where the senior people are generous, and there are fields where they are not (and people cross-link, too, so you can be generous both to underlings and cross-lings). Sometimes, this seems to depend on the personality, the character, of the people who made it big. I know one particular person, who is a middling-senior person now, and he’s one of the most scientifically generous people I know. To some extent, it’s because he’s just incapable of keeping his mouth shut. But, because of this he shares ideas — even if the shared idea will result in someone scooping him to a CNS paper. Behavior like this changes the field, if those generous folk can survive. It can mean that the field gains prominence over other fields, where the people are more pinched and selfish. It should be an incentive, but it doesn’t end up being one if you know you’ll survive no matter what.

(Keep fighting! I wasn’t a Hillary supporter, but there’s a quote from a friend — in a Washington post article that has rung true for me “‘She Could Accept Losing. She Could Not Accept Quitting.’ Fighting doesn’t guarantee success, but quitting guarantees failure. It’s a lesson that we don’t seem to teach women. I sat in on a bicycling class for 6 year olds the other day. At the end of the one hour session, all four boys were on the field, and agreeing to do the last exercise. The girls were giving up. I complained to my daughter, and said that we have to learn not to do that).

Your field is doing better than mine… I wonder why?

Yes, it’s depressing. But- here’s the thing- I know right now I’m in good company with the unfunded. I also know that if you don’t have help from great senior colleagues you don’t make it. In a weird sort of way this actually provides a lot of comfort in my current situation.

Mad Hatter-

Yes, I see the problem with doing this for your area. I wonder if it is possible to do this by study section, because I would like to compare across everyone that works on pathogenic bacteria… but short of typing in each organism one at a time… the best way to go about this is that we all pretty much go to the same study section.

The postdocs that have emerged from the 8 big labs … are they getting faculty positions? Interesting you should ask that… me and another colleague in the field yesterday tried to name off postdocs that we know came out of these labs that are currently in faculty postions. The list is pretty darn short- I think we had about 4 we could name in the united states (in faculty positions, none at assistant professor level)- but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more- we simply don’t know the credentials of all the younger faculty on the list from our memory. The list was longer (by 3 people) if we took those that went overseas.

So that was just a long-winded way to say that I don’t know the situation for my virus. When I briefly scanned the list, I did see the names of several junior investigators I know, although I didn’t check to see if those were R01s.

Are the postdocs that have emerged from the 8 big labs in your field getting faculty positions and publishing on MFO? I’m wondering if they’re leaving the field altogether.

That graph is just utterly depressing. And so is your commentary.

(just had to add my 2 cents)