"Research" or Glorified Microsoft Office suite operator

I'm doing research this summer. It's not any research. It's cancer research, which automatically makes people think it's important research. This means I'm getting paid by my medical school to work with a faculty mentor full time for seven weeks.

It's actually epidemiology research that's sort of related to cancer but not really. To most people, that sounds a lot less impressive than cancer research because they don't know what the hell epidemiology is about. (Wait, I don't know what epidemiology is...) It actually means that I wait around for my mentor to give me some numbers that I can make into a diagram, textbox, or table and put it in a powerpoint slide. My chief job responsibility is formatting a powerpoint slide that's to be a poster and writing the manuscript for a paper that I really don't understand.

I'll be getting a W-2 this year! This is the first paying job I've had since ... summer 2009? I had forgotten about the magic that is direct deposit.

Does anyone have experience carrying a large poster tube on the airplane? Please get in touch with me. I will have to do this in about a month's time.

The good news is that I felt a little less incompetent during my weekly meeting with my research mentor and Skype call with her collaborator, an epidemiologist at the University of South Carolina). Usually It was not because I contributed meaningfully to the discussion between my mentor and her collaborator because another (soon-to-be) second year student was there who seemed just as clueless as I was.

I've been reading a somewhat famous blogger on the med student blog circuit, Action Potential (http://apotential.wordpress.com/), who wrote about her summer research frustrations here. She's funny.

Hymen Shmymen

 Just want to say that I and two other smart young ladies write a blog focused on gender and science. This entry is cross posted at herstoryofscience.blogspot.com. Please check it out!
 
Since medical school began, I've only managed to read one non-required book in the last two months. It's not a fact I'm proud of but I think I spend my scarce time wisely. I read Hanne Blank's Virgin: The Untouched History, an account of the history and nature of virginity. It's an accessible and entertaining read for my overtaxed brain.

This was one thing I learned:

Despite the lack of any actual studies in the literature regarding whether horseback riding, gymnastics, or riding bicycles might have to do with womens' hymens, virtually every contemporary writing about virginity aimed at teen girls is duly equipped with a disclaimer that says something along the lines of 'many girls tear or otherwise dilate their hymen while participating in sports like bicycling, horseback riding, or gymnastics.'"

Woah. There is no scientific evidence that these activities stretch or tear the hymen! Yet I've heard this countless times in teenage girl magazines or otherwise informative literature on puberty and sexuality. Be sure, this "fact" is not just something from conservative abstinence-only sex education curriculum but widely seem in popular and generally accurate sex ed. It's probably in those puberty books your pediatrician recommended you to read. Understandably this belief was popularized in order to dissociate hymen with virginity. In recent years (decades?), it's become more acceptable for girls to participate in sports and the hymen less a gauge of virginity.

I think it also shows that the empirical evidence or lack thereof don't affect people's beliefs that much, in sexual matters and otherwise. In medical school we grumble all the time about evidence-based medicine. It should dictate medical practice but often it doesn't. Doctors and patients often want and perform procedures that aren't medically better than the other options.

Have you heard this when you were growing up?

Things I Think About: Big Talk, edited

An extended version of what was posted a few hours ago. 

One of the most read articles on NYTimes.com the past few days has been this one on the correlation between happiness and substantive conversations. This study found that people for whom substantive conversations -- rather than small talk -- made up a greater proportion of their total conversations rate themselves happier.

The author of the study on the reasons for this:

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people. 

From Talk Deeply, Be Happy?

In the comments follow this article, one reader tried to draw a connection between social media and the substance of conversations, noting that this is perhaps why interactions on Twitter and Facebook don't make people happier. 

Of course it's just a causation but it is interesting to see evidence backing up what I have felt in my interactions with people.

Reading this, naturally I reviewed the substantive conversations I have had in Denmark. So there it was. The cause of the general dis-ease I have felt the past weeks coincides with the lack of conversations I've had the last couple weeks. It's not because the initial excitement of being in a new place has mellowed that I've been feeling drab. During the first few weeks I certainly met new people and made small talk with them but I also managed some really insightful conversations. Somehow this dried up in recent weeks while the stream of parties, dinner parties, and sightseeing trips Århus continued.

Don't get me wrong, I have many friends in Århus, friends whose hospitality I have and will depend on in the future, friends who invite me to their dorms for dinner, friends with whom I've drunk vodka, which apparently makes us good friends, so some Polish guys have been trying to tell me... but I've miss some element of the weeks before.

I want to know more than how to say cheers in their language.

Imnotstupidimnotstupidimnotstupid. Repeat.

Lists, Nobel Prize, Science Funding, Depression

Before: Regular jellyfish.

I'll start with the Nobel prize. In an article article aptly titled "Depression and then Nobel Prize", Tara Parker-Hope elaborates on depression as the major factor for Douglas C. Prasher leaving biomedical research. (Kenneth Chang wrote the original article published in the Times.) In addition to individual cause of Prasher leaving biomed research, there are larger structural issues too, mainly inadequate science research funding.

Prasher's relationship to this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry is that he was the first scientist to isolate the fluorescent protein gene from jellyfish. The Nobel was awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien for the technique of inserting this gene into other organisms to use as a marker. Prasher gave the gene to Chalfie when they were both working at Woods Hole and Prasher then left Woods Hole.

But reading the blog post and Chang's original article, it struck me that this attribution ignores larger structural problems with science research: lack of funding. Prasher's story through this lens would read something like this:

• Applied for 5-year NIH grant to study fluorescent protein gene. Application denied.
• Applied for 2-year American Cancer Society grant to study the same. Grant received. But it was less money than the NIH grant.
• Quit job at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
• Gets job at USDA. Quits job. Beginning of depression.
• Gets job as NASA subcontractor. Position eliminated due to lack of funding.
• Depression returns.
• Gets job driving van for Toyota dealer.
  

I don't know what caused what: if depression lead to loss of interest in job or lack of research funding lead to depression. I don't know if maybe Prasher just wasn't a very good scientist and the other NIH grant applicants really were better than he was.

But depression seems to me only a part of the problem. I don't think this is sufficient evidence to make this an example of the American individualist psyche that blames failure (and glory) on individuals, but I'm tempted to make the generalization. I'm also tempted to turn this into a policy pitch for increased federal funding for science research. The bad news is that NIH funding has remained flat since about 2003 and flat funding is in essence decreased funding because of inflation.

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I try to keep a short list of things I want to write about soon but I usually never get to write about most of these things because my (un)productivity is about one entry a week. I hope that now that I write these out, I'll feel like I have an obligation to write them.

This week I want to write about:

• Nicholas Kristof's NYT column about the global effect of a potential Obama presidency.
• Pauline Chen's post on the Well blog about literary medicine and its role in medical education.
  
• The Man Who Set Stage of a Nobel Now Lives a Life Outside Science
  

I read publications outside the NYTimes, I swear.

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After:












Mouse neurons. source
An image drawn with fluorescent bacteria colonies on an agar plate. source