legionnaire

I try really hard not to go on a rant in my journals, but I think it's unavoidable today, I need to get some of this off my chest. This morning I was stuck on the subway trying to get to the lab (and missing a bunch of seminars that I really wanted to hear, including John Searle) and this annoying tourist woman standing next to me was talking to me the whole time. Since we're Americans, and the only thing Americans ever want to talk about is work, we eventually got on the subject of what I do for a living.

This is a topic that I've learned to try and avoid talking about when I meet people for several reasons. Mainly though, because I've learned that the responses that I get when I tell people that I'm getting my PhD in neurobiology can usually be sorted into the following categories:

A) A quick follow up question asking "What do you study?" followed by an immediate glazing over of the eyes.

B) An immediate question asking "Why didn't you go to medical school?"

C) An aggressively worded inquiry into the ethical nature of the work that I do.

D) A sincerely interested response asking what I do and an honest attempt to make sense of it.

I'd put the relative frequency of these responses into the following distribution: A-40%, B-30%, C-20%, D-10%. And to be perfectly honest, the D response is the only one that I like, so 90% of the time I just get annoyed with the conversation.

Anyway, this woman chose to go with option B. This is my least favorite option because not only does it indicate that the person doesn't' know what they're talking about, but sugggests that they think they do. Most people are unaware of this, but biology PhDs are constantly forced to suffer from the (false) public impression that we are somehow not as good as MDs, and that getting a PhD in biology is sort of like playing in the NIT for a college basketball team - sure, it sounds OK, but even the winner of the NIT is still not as good as the worst participant in the NCAA championship. Fortunately, most real MDs do not share this perception, and we have a mutual understanding that MDs are absolutely necessary to practice medicine, and PhDs are absolutely necessary to try and figure out how the hell things work so the MDs can fix them when they go wrong. It's a mutually beneficial relationship, and actually, probably the highest percentage of D responses I get are from either other scientists or MDs.

This may sound really stupid, but I believe a large part of this false impression comes from Hollywood. How many shows about doctors can you name? Without even really thinking about it I can come up with 5. If I spent more time I'm sure I'd think of additional ones. Now, how many shows about (real, not stupid sci-fi ones) scientists can you come up with? I can think of none. How many scientist characters in movies can you think of? A few - but they're almost universally lumped into one of two categories - either the evil genius or the pathetic wimp who does whatever someone tells them to do. The net result is that scientists have a very negative image in the perception of the general public. This has long term effects beyond giving me occasionally unbearable conversations with midwestern tourists. Government representatives are (sometimes) responsive to their constituents concerns, and when people start writing letters to their congresspeople and senators saying things like "How can you justify spending money on researching the sociology of sex-change patients when we're fighting terrorism? I want that money spent on my defense!" the money gets shifted. Since George Bush has been in office the NIH has experienced the slowest expansion of its budget since the early Reagan years, which is choking publicly funded biomedical research. And part of that is because of the poor perception of scientists.

So not only are we considered to be second-class citizens when compared with our medicinal brethren, but people don't see any value at all in the work that we devote our lives to doing, for their benefit! And then when people do ask what it is that you do, the immediate response is that it has no value, often followed up by a helpful suggestion like "Why don't you study something like cancer? Lots of people are dying from that." That's like asking a professional baseball player why he doesn't play football, because football is such a great game. While it may be, people have talents and interests in different areas, and they should be free to try and figure out what areas they like best and do the best in, and be allowed to pursue them. I don't hear a lot of businesspeople or lawyers or artists told what they should be doing with their professional lives, and yet scientists are expected to be interchangeable, like all we do is study 'Science' and the topic is unimportant, we have no attachment to it.

Anyway, I could seriously go on for a while longer about this, but I think I'll spare you all any more 'woe is me' from the scientific world for now. Thanks for reading.