Chronicle of a Check Foretold: Reflections on Validation in Science

By Jake Reimer | 1.15.07

To the casual observer, the scientific poster is just a visual aid, a simple instrument that serves the sole purpose of facilitating communication at scientific conferences. However, if you’re a graduate student or post-doc, a poster is much more than just a tidy way to present the results of your research to your colleagues. That four foot cardboard tube that refuses to fit in the overhead bin is your name on the guest list, a VIP stamp on your wrist, a blank check made out in your name that can be cashed for any amount – well, at least up to the modest limits of government-approved daily accommodation and dining allowances. For junior scientists, going a-conferencing is not just about getting a break from the laboratory grind, networking, or catching up on the newest results in their field, its about a desperate need for approbation, about getting all-too-rare props, and about living it up like they deserve for just a few days. Understanding this need for validation, this culture of reimbursement that pervades scientific conferences is key for anyone who wants insight into the life of an up-and-coming researcher.

I found myself face to face with this phenomenon when I decided to go to the Society for Neuroscience conference this past November without a poster. I knew I wouldn’t be able to participate in that carefree congenial society that comes when everyone knows that someone else is going to step in at the end of the night and pick up the tab. But I had lived in Atlanta for a year on a bike messenger’s salary and I had already booked my friends’ hotel room floors for the week. Only the inevitable long nights of heavy drinking threatened to swamp my frugal budget.

To keep myself in liquid assets, I decided I would depend on the generosity of some of the thirty-thousand other conferencees; I brought my violin along to help wring whatever money I could out of them with some sweet, sweet music. In the past I’ve done pretty well at this; I can hammer out a decent Vivaldi and I can play my soul out on “Devil went Down to Georgia”. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve fiddled for money on street corners from Canal St. to St. Germain. So, I had a good feeling about playing to an audience of neuroscientists, despite the deep personal tragedy suffered at last year’s SFN meeting when my previous violin was reduced, in one tire-squeal, to a pile of toothpicks by a careless Hertz Rental Car employee. To be completely honest, I thought I’d clean up – most of these people were looking forward to a reimbursement check when they got back home anyway.

As it turned out, I was horribly mistaken. I couldn’t even pull in chuckle change with a sign that said “NIH funding cuts – please help.” I got plenty of laughs and sympathetic smiles thrown my way, but no cash. Even the NIH section chief walked by without gracing my case with so much as a quarter. I played for almost an hour outside the Hard Rock Café and I made $1.35. Outside the tapas bar where I used to sling Jager shots when I was an Atlanta native, my net proceeds were $1.00. At four AM in a light drizzle outside the club that hosted the infamous MIT party, I made a big fat bagel – even though the large, uniformly drunk crowd clapped at the end of every song.

At first I was, so to speak, a little put off. Why had my scientific brethren forsaken me? Are neuroscientists just inherently cheap? Were they so involved in their conversations about ion channels and gene segments that they couldn’t take the time to reach into their pockets? Had the thick atmosphere of anxiety about government funding cuts that pervaded the conference trickled all the way down to garnish the wages of the street-corner minstrel? As I tried to put myself in the shoes of the vaguely dorky individuals passing me by on the sidewalk with their drug company tote bags and conference nametags still slung around their necks, I realized that I was missing the big picture. It wasn’t stinginess, myopia, or apathy that was preventing these people from contributing to the cause. It was a sense of entitlement, of privileges long-deferred, sentiments that I realized I would have been feeling myself if I wasn’t paying for the trip on my own nickel.

I understand now that my drinking budget was a victim of what Bobos in Paradise author David Brooks calls “Status-Income Disequilibrium”. Simply put, SID is that vague feeling of resentment that is harbored by individuals (despite their noble intentions) who voluntarily chose a lower income career path than they might have. It’s the source of discomfort at cocktail parties when the Silicon Valley maven, the lawyer, and the English professor who all went to college together start talking about their most recent vacations. It’s the difference between being smart and rich, and just being smart. For grad students in particular, this disparity weighs heavily.

Consider the experience of a nascent scientist, “Cara”. Lets say Cara’s a biochem major in college, a smart kid who hangs out with other smart kids. She applies to a science graduate program at a prestigious university in her senior year and is accepted. Right out of college, a few of her friends are already pulling in twice her graduate student stipend working for Microsoft or writing web pages. While those friends are driving around in their new Jettas and shopping at the Sharper Image on their weekends off, she’s stuck doing homework at nights (something her friends will never have to do again) and making liver-cell smoothies in a basement lab. Three years later, while Cara’s just starting to grapple with her dissertation, her other friends that chose the law school track have offers at firms for three or four times her graduate student wage. Another four years pass and she finally tacks on those three coveted letters at the end of her name and starts her first post-doc for forty grand a year. But by then her ex-boyfriend who went to medical school is a junior physician making close to six digits. Unless she discovers a cure for baldness or starts working as a consultant for the tobacco industry Cara will never catch up. She won’t be poor, but she won’t be doing laps in a pool of caviar either.

Conferences are moments where people like Cara get to live the VIP dream. The same situation holds true for senior scientists as well. Imagine that Dr. Doe spends sixty hours a week studying the nervous system of the locust. Most of the time he’s chained to his desk, writing grants or managing the lab. But for a few days out of the year, he flies to Spain to share his results with his colleagues. Once he’s there, the room at the luxury hotel just steps from the Mediterranean, the paella and caipirinhas (all gratis), the flags on the streetlamps welcoming him and his fellow conference-goers, these things convince him that the “real world” truly values his contribution to insect neurophysiology. For those few days, he doesn’t want to pay for anything, sidewalk musicians included. He even keeps the receipt for a measly coffee at Starbucks. Why? Because he’s getting PAID, baby, and poppa don’t shell out for no four dollar latte when he’s getting his conference on. When that reimbursement check comes in the mail, it might as well come with a big ol’ career-validating gold star .

If you’re more well read than I am, you may already know what the definition of ‘junket’ is: ‘A trip, as by an official or legislative committee, paid for out of public funds and ostensibly to obtain information’ (the key here is ‘ostensibly’). In a moment of delicious irony, I first learned what the word meant while sitting in a hot tub at a resort in Key Biscayne – one of those locales where the merely rich are engaged in a desperate struggle to live like the very rich – drinking cocktails and watching the moonlit waves roll onto the beach a few feet away. It would have been a truly romantic scene if it wasn’t for the half-dozen other middle-aged neuroscientists sharing the tub with me. While its true that most scientific conferences are junkets, this need not imply that they are a grandly luxurious waste of time. Information is exchanged, contacts are made, science is advanced. But the next time you’re on vacation in some exclusive tropical paradise, and that out-of-place guy in front of you at Starbucks seems oblivious to the fact that he’s still wearing his nametag, just try this little experiment: Ask him about his work, tell him it sounds interesting, make him feel appreciated, and when you finally get to the counter, see if he still asks for his receipt.