John Trant

GOP Congressman Says ‘Muslims Don’t Belong In American Society’ Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee also called it “a lie” that diverse groups of people can respectfully engage with each other.

Diverse groups of people have no trouble respectfully engaging with one another. I see it all the time. It's the best of humanity.

Small-minded assholish bigots, however, have trouble with respect for anyone, and don't deserve our respect or consideration. He's taking a very anti-Christian stand.

But the technique is perhaps perfect for many things and shouldnt be lost in the noise. So it deserves its own paper.

End t-Rant.

Maybe that stuff is exactly what someone else needs, and so we will get it out. I am a bad judge of what is important. And to bring this back around, that means that often the application we are using a technique for will like not be cutting edge/best in class for long.

But the paper wasn't the point. It's just a byproduct of solving a problem...partially. But even in this we learnt a lot. Protein aggregation kinetics are really sensitive to secondary metabolite identity. Different aprotic solvents find different times for maximal extraction without degradation.

So we'll publish. Its patented and the products will be rolling out, but it would be good to show how to do this with other natural extracts.

So a extremely inexpensive free flowing powder that freely dissolves with an all-mushroom clean label and reliable measured levels of the supposed actives is useful and...novel. And frankly will be used by more people than our cool C-H activation methods.

But, walk into your nearest Health food store and look at all the snake oil mushroom products that dont contain mushrooms (or at least not the stated species); or try to use them and dissolve them in liquid and look at the brown gunge that never dissolves.

For instance, we are finishing a half dozen separate reports about mushroom nutraceutical formulation. Is it scientifically super important in that it changes our understanding of the universe? No.

So yeah, I never learnt that papers were important. Good. I learnt that learning new things and asking big questions is important. And that our stuff needs to matter.

Look, I'm a lucky SOB. I got a job by just doing good science and not worrying about papers like some freakin' idiot savant. I stumbled into a job by luck, and never had been trained to chase papers. He'll, I worked for Hudlicky who despised publishing in general and what it was doing to integrity.

We give those people jobs. And then they rightly believe it is because they got the big paper. And then they start training their people that the way to get big university jobs is to publish the big paper and that needs to be the goal. And the abuse of Science is propagated to the next generation.

When stuff like this is REQUIRED for a top journal, and when a top journal is a trump card a postdoc can play in a job application (no one actually READING the paper of course or caring too much about the role of that postdoc leading author), we incentivize this.

But it was clearly showing IMPORTANT data using NEW methods on an IMPORTANT problem. That hurt as I had tried to take a really complex data set and was pretty proud of myself. But he's kinda right.

But then it became the thought that to publish in a GLAM journal, one needed a ton of studies from a ton of angles and it all had to be new.

One of my guys told me in a group meeting that a graph I made was clearly for a Nature paper because he couldn't figure out what the hell was going on.

They get gamed and what they measured when first identified is not what they measure anymore.

That's not controversial I think at all. But I'd argue superpapers are the same. There are good reasons for some of them for sure!!! The story needed it all to tell the story. And that was right.

All metrics are abstract surrogate quantitative simplifications of a complex underlying goal. And as soon as they are used for evaluation or comparison, they are useless.

H index, Impact Factor, paper/money counting, citation counts and author order are all examples of this poison.

Papers arent the point. I firmly believe that if we ever believe that publishing is the point, then I'm doing this really wrong. Nature superpapers have become another example that once ANY metric becomes used to judge anything, it becomes a target itself.

But this is just a "research update" from our lab. We've completed....0 projects in the >100 papers from the group. No question is answered to our satisfaction. Some we have put down and won't pick up again...likely...but others are in hibernation, waiting for the right scientist; others plod on.

And we do what little things we need to do to wrap the paper (studies or characterization, or shiny/glowy experiments that reviewers like--magpies) and start the desk rejection cycle.

But the key thing here is that in the past 8 years (of 10 of this job) I've never started a project to publish a paper. Or envisioned the paper at the beginning. We are chasing questions. When we have a partial.stpry we think might be useful, or a dead end that enlightens (they all do), we pivot.

So we publish a lot in "low impact" society and (non-predatory) journals...it takes nothing away to have those papers on my CV. Im proud of all of them.

I have spent money and time on getting some data that doesn't tell a coherent story...more times than I can think. And I try to publish all of it. Wasn't my money, wasn't my time-I owe it to get data out so someone can make sense of it. It is true...just...cant figure it out.

On the other hand I strongly disagree with the slow science movement. Any limit on publication is wrong. People should publish all true studies and true data. You never know what is needed. I've found answers in data dumps in The Egyptian Journal of Chemistry. Thanks to the authors.

I can easily forgive a PUI lab or a small team from targeting a paper as a project. Its what we incentivize and it isn't their job to fight the fight. Its the job of everyone running a team that CAN do better.

I worry we are training generations of scientists that the goal is to publish papers. And that isn't. It cant be. The goal is to do good science and chase questions. Papers happen along the way.

Like for everyone who isn't in a super lab, these focused papers are the entire way they (we) publish. I think chasing Nature, or any one paper as the project target, is a huge disservice to science. And is especially malpractice for superlative with resources to not play the game.

Each is 1+ PhD degrees itself. I think one can publish the tool with a more limiting application to centre the technique without hurting impact of the main paper. Cause no one else can put it all together like you can. So no scoop risk.

And new innovations in computational screening of peptides. All to find new treatments for autoimmune diseases with no genetic engineering/Car-T. So cheap. Its Nature-like in scope. But we will be publishing the technical advances one at a time.

This turned into a rant by accident.

We are always thinking about this and are facing it right now: new molecules and some new routes to them with some new chemistry, some new Assays for the biology slashing costs by three orders of magnitude (not this research...but per sample moving forward)

Like Israel was founded to give a powerless people power. You think they'd understand, of anyone, how this works.