tomandzoe.com - live from the northside

The world of academia is full of high-ranking professionals protecting their patches. In general they are rather aggressive, while the lowly students are subdued and respectful. Unfortunately, that’s not really my style - I prefer to tell it like it is a bit and see what happens. Usually people think you’re a complete wanker (which may or may not be true). Perhaps they feel threatened that you’re not that interested in becoming a super-scientist, ‘How could anyone not want to publish 500 papers?’ they seem to ask.

For example, Karin recently attended a genetics conference in Brisbane. She was told, in no uncertain terms, that her scientific/career approach was totally wrong. A guy actually said to her, “You’re reinventing the wheel, but you’re making it square and with spikes!”. What the hell? Where do people think that it’s ok to talk to people like that? I guess it didn’t really matter, because she did manage to organise a post-doc on computational biology. When I mentioned this to a previous colleague of hers at the conference in Hobart I was told, “Well, she is very bright. I don’t know about you…”. I could only laugh.

After a week of these encounters I was starting to think that science may not be for me after all. I mean, who could be bothered dealing with this sort of shit? I gave my talk on climate change on Friday and was critical of the ‘establishment’ for not considering the impact of climate change on freshwater systems. A couple of people came up afterwards and said, “We have been thinking about it. We’ve got funding to do x, y and z”. To which I replied, “I don’t mean to be rude, but have you published it?”. One guy said, “Well, where are your publications on climate change?”. At the time I said, “Touche”, but later thought that isn’t really the point - I’d love to know about projects that are going on and am simply interested in seeing us better prepared for dealing with the impacts. Meanwhile, others were more receptive, saying, “I liked your talk, good presentation, it’s good to see students challenging this status-quo, let’s talk more…”.

However, the absolute classic was when a guy from the Uni of Tasmania, after giving a plenary talk on his expensive research into Tuna movements in WA, tried to convince me that, “the reason marine systems don’t get enough funding is because freshwater is soaking up all the money”. Holy crap! That’s the biggest load of complete bullshit I’ve ever heard. His evidence was that the Murray-Darling has just got $45 million to install fishways on dams and weirs in the system. The thing is, the basin needs about 450 billion spent on it, and it costs between $100,000 and $200,000 for every vertical meter you want to elevate fish.

Then he asked a dealer from Vemco, the manufacturer of the tagging equipment who he thought received more funding. Surprisingly, he agreed, saying that the salmon researchers get a heap of bling - like he’s going to give an unbiased answer when you’ve just given him a bucketload of cash for gear. I suggested that maybe it was just that science in general could be better funded and that it was a bit of a shit-fight for everyone to get their money. He replied, “No, it’s freshwater!”. Sigh, I thought salmon lived in salt water too…

The other great story I heard was from another JCU student at the conference. She was asked what she did by a local and replied, “I’m a marine biologist”. The local said, “Oh, so you scrub penguins do you?”. Ahaha, penguin scrubbers.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 10:42 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.