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Universities call for commitment to research funding
Canada’s centres of higher education are calling on the federal government and private sector to continue to spend on research and development even during the current economic uncertainty, to avoid falling behind the rest of the world.
In a report published this week entitled Momentum, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada said Canada spent $29 billion on research and development last year, an increase of 93 per cent from 1992. The country would have to increase research and development spending to $70 billion by 2015 in order to keep up with other nations, the report said.
The Conservative government issued a science policy paper in 2007 outlining its strategy to focus on gaining a competitive advantage in four areas: the environment, medicine, information technologies and natural resources and energy. One thing it did not do, the report said, was tie research funding to gross domestic product (GDP) to measure research intensity, as other nations have done.
The report estimates that Canada would need to aspire to spend a minimum of three per cent of GDP on gross expenditures on research and development (GERD) to be among the world leaders in research.
“The competition to rank among world leaders in R&D investments and, by extension, R&D returns, is thus fierce,” the report said.
Michelle Gauthier, the main author of the report, said the $70-billion goal is an ambitious target and one that might not be pursued given the current economic climate, but she said it serves as a reminder as to how competition in research and development is growing.
“It really gives a sense of the scope of the challenge before us if we want to be globally competitive over the long term,” said Gauthier, the director of the research and policy analysis division of the AUCC.
Canada spent a record high 2.09 per cent of GDP on research in 2001, but since then a booming economy and slower growth in research investments has decreased that ratio to 1.89 per cent in 2007.
Spending in the private sector and the federal government has been stagnant in recent years, a result of the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001 and no real growth in federal since 2005.
While the federal government has not increased spending on its own research and development, it has increasingly allocated funds to university-based research, spending more than $2.9 billion last year through a variety of funding agencies, most notably the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
As a result, university-funded research has taken on an increasingly important role, the report found.
University-funded research accounted for 36 per cent of research funding totalling $10.4 billion in 2007, the report said, a much larger portion than the 17 per cent average among developed countries.
In comparison, Canada’s private sector accounts for 54 per cent of research funding, lower than the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of 69 per cent.
The AUCC said a continued commitment to university funding is needed to remain competitive.
“We cannot afford to be complacent,” said the report. “The rest of the world is not standing still and the global race for research talent is becoming more and more intense.
“Furthermore, increasing emphasis on research and knowledge mobilization has added to the strain on university resources, particularly because external sponsors of university research often do not cover the full costs of that research.”
About $4.8 billion of this is covered by university operating budgets, with the remainder covered mostly by federal and provincial governments.
The report pointed out that this investment has a direct economic benefit to the country, university research contributing as much as $60 billion to the gross domestic product in 2007 according to some estimates.
Main federal funding mechanisms for university research (2007)
in millions of dollars (Cdn)
CIHR 725
NSERC 698
Indirect Costs Program 315
Canada Foundation for Innovation 298
Canada Research Chairs Program 258
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council 179
Centres for Excellence for Commercialization and Research program 163
Canada Graduate Scholarships program 116
Genome Canada 92
Networks of Centres of Excellence program 80
Total 2,924
Source: AUCC
SCWIST Newsletter - October 2008
Read the latest edition of SCWIST News SCWIST-News-2008-October.pdf
SFU professor recognized for research on diabetes
Graeme Wood
Vancouver Sun – Saturday, October 18, 2008
The Canadian Diabetes Association awarded a prestigious national award on Friday to a Simon Fraser University professor for her efforts in diabetes research.
Dr. Diane Finegood, who teaches in the Faculty of Applied Sciences, was given the 2008 Frederick G. Banting Award, which recognizes significant contributions to the prevention of diabetes or to improving the quality of life of those with the disease, according a Canadian Diabetes Association’s press statement.
The award was announced at the 12th Annual Canadian Diabetes Association and Canadian Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism Professional conference.
Finegood is the founding scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes.
Finegood has focused on obesity and its connection to diabetes. She is responsible for helping assemble an array of academic disciplines to address obesity and the need for new approaches towards the condition.
She has a “great appreciation of public health issues,” said the statement from the association.
The Canadian Diabetes Association works in communities across the country with a goal of promoting the health of Canadians and eliminating diabetes.
APEGBC Meritorious Achievement Award to Rhonda Netzel
Congratulations to Rhonda Netzel, PEng who received a 2008 Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of BC Meritorious Achievement Award.
Determination and personal drive took Rhonda Netzel from an EIT to a well-respected ad sought-after electrical engineer in just 16 short years. Since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1989, her thirst for technical knowledge and thorough approach in applying engineering principles have helped her achieve an outstanding professional track record. Early in her career, Rhonda found her niche in power systems analysis, and now designs electrical systems for international mining projects. In 1998 she founded Sequoia Engineering, a successful enterprise that is now responsible for the electrical design of the largest mobile conveying system in the world. Rhonda has always appreciated the need to give back to her profession and provides many hours of service as a Registration Interviewer for APEGBC, assessing the professional experience of new applicants.Her many accomplishments and her dedication to her professional excellence make Rhonda an outstanding recipient of the APEGBC Meritorious Achievement Award.
Rebecca Wolfe - Manning Innovation Award winner
Congratulations to Rebecca Wolfe of Summerside, PEI for receiving a Young Canadian innovation award for her identification of Ciona Intestinalis.
Rebecca Wolfe’s science fair project to detect invasive species in waterways has earned her a $4000 Manning Young Canadian Award and $500 Manning Innovation Achievement Award. Wolfe was among over 450 finalists at the 2008 Canada-Wide Science Fair, held in Ottawa, May 10th to 18th. The 17-year-old student from Summerside, Prince Edward Island, developed a genetic tool to detect the troublesome sea squirt, Ciona intestinalis.
Also known as the vase tunicate, C. intestinalis is a small, tube-like invertebrate that affixes itself to buoys, harvesting gear, ships’ hulls and docks. In Nova Scotia and P.E.I, far from its natural habitat, the tenacious tunicate disrupts aquatic ecosystems and wreaks havoc with aquaculture equipment. The mussel growing industry in P.E.I. has been particularly affected by vase tunicate infestations.
Current methods to detect the vase tunicate include suspending plates in the water and waiting-up to four months-for tunicate larvae to attach and grow, or directly inspecting water samples for vase tunicate larvae. Distinguishing C. intestinalis from other tunicate species at the larval stage is very difficult, however. Wolfe developed a genetic test that would allow the invasive species to be quickly detected. Specifically, she designed and tested a DNA primer that matches a gene sequence unique to C. intestinalis. The primer can be used with the polymerase chain reaction technique to amplify and therefore identify even minute amounts of the vase tunicate’s DNA in water samples.
Wolfe, who has long been interested in marine biology, plans to build on her environmental innovation.
The Ernest C. Manning Awards Foundation introduced the Young Canadian Program in 1992 to recognize Canada’s innovative youth. Each year a judging team selects eight winning projects at the Canada-Wide Science Fair (CWSF) for a $500 Manning Innovation Achievement Award. These are presented at the CWSF ceremony; four of these are selected for a $4000 Manning Young Canadian Innovation Award.
Female scientist shares in 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi shared in a quarter of the prize for her discovery along with Luc Montagnier of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Virus production was identified in lymphocytes from patients with enlarged lymph nodes in early stages of acquired immunodeficiency, and in blood from patients with late stage disease. They characterized this retrovirus as the first known human lentivirus based on its morphological, biochemical and immunological properties. HIV impaired the immune system because of massive virus replication and cell damage to lymphocytes. The discovery was one prerequisite for the current understanding of the biology of the disease and its antiretroviral treatment.
Discovery of HIV
Following medical reports of a novel immunodeficiency syndrome in 1981, the search for a causative agent was on. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier isolated and cultured lymph node cells from patients that had swollen lymph nodes characteristic of the early stage of acquired immune deficiency. They detected activity of the retroviral enzyme reverse transcriptase, a direct sign of retrovirus replication. They also found retroviral particles budding from the infected cells. Isolated virus infected and killed lymphocytes from both diseased and healthy donors, and reacted with antibodies from infected patients. In contrast to previously characterized human oncogenic retroviruses, the novel retrovirus they had discovered, now known as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), did not induce uncontrolled cell growth. Instead, the virus required cell activation for replication and mediated cell fusion of T lymphocytes. This partly explained how HIV impairs the immune system since the T cells are essential for immune defence. By 1984, Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier had obtained several isolates of the novel human retrovirus, which they identified as a lentivirus, from sexually infected individuals, haemophiliacs, mother to infant transmissions and transfused patients. The significance of their achievements should be viewed in the context of a global ubiquitous epidemic affecting close to 1% of the population.
Importance of the HIV discovery
Soon after the discovery of the virus, several groups contributed to the definitive demonstration of HIV as the cause of acquired human immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier’s discovery made rapid cloning of the HIV-1 genome possible. This has allowed identification of important details in its replication cycle and how the virus interacts with its host. Furthermore, it led to development of methods to diagnose infected patients and to screen blood
products, which has limited the spread of the pandemic. The unprecedented development of several classes of new antiviral drugs is also a result of knowledge of the details of the viral replication cycle. The combination of prevention and treatment has substantially decreased spread of the disease and dramatically increased life expectancy among treated patients. The cloning of HIV enabled studies of its origin and evolution. The virus was probably passed to humans from chimpanzees in West Africa early in the 20th century, but it is still unclear why the epidemic spread so dramatically from 1970 and onwards.
Identification of virus−host interactions has provided information on how HIV evades the host’s immune system by impairing lymphocyte function, by constantly changing and by hiding its genome in the host lymphocyte DNA, making its eradication in the infected host difficult even after long-term antiviral treatment. Extensive knowledge about these unique viral host interactions has, however, generated results that can provide ideas for future vaccine development as well as for therapeutic approaches targeting viral latency.
HIV has generated a novel pandemic. Never before has science and medicine been so quick to discover, identify the origin and provide treatment for a new disease entity. Successful anti-retroviral therapy results in life expectancies for persons with HIV infection now reaching levels similar to those of uninfected people.
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, born 1947 in France, French citizen, PhD in virology, Institut Pasteur, Garches, France. Professor and Director, Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit, Virology Department, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France.
Petro-Canada executive not an “honourary man”
Kathy Sendall stands out as an example of where talent should take a career
Gina Teel
Vancouver Sun – Monday, October 06, 2008
Kathy Sendall is a shining example of where smarts, talent and hard work should take a career.
As Petro-Canada’s senior vice-president, North America natural gas, Sendall’s gender makes her somewhat of a rarity in the senior ranks of the energy patch.
A mechanical engineer who’s held a number of management positions since joining Petro-Canada in 1982, Sendall is a beacon in the fog for women with serious career advancement in mind.
Her successful climb up the corporate ladder in the male-dominated energy industry is an achievement in its own right—though Sendall said she’s not sure she’d single that out as separate and distinct from other career challenges she may have faced.
That she’s done it without suppressing her femininity or losing her sense of humour is quite another in the eyes of everyday working women slogging it out in the trenches.
With her well-known penchant for shoes and sunglasses, Sendall said she likes to be known for having a sense of style.
“Although I know that it has been very important for me to develop a style that men are comfortable with, I don’t want to be an honourary man,” Sendall recently told a sold-out crowd at the Women of Influence luncheon series.
Regarding the humour, she recently bought a doormat for her office that says, ‘The Witch is in,’ because she thought it was fun and it brought a smile to her face and that of others.
Sendall’s career success is only part of the reason why she’s won the admiration of legions of career women looking to get ahead. In 2006, she was the first woman to be named chair of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP); last year she was inducted into Canada’s Most Powerful Women, Top 100 Hall of Fame—just two of many accolades she’s garnered over the years.
In short, she’s done it all while having it all, including a 32-year marriage that produced two children, now grown, as well as an enviable record in community service.
“Among women leaders in Calgary, in the oil and gas industry, and in Canada, Kathy stands out as an example of what is possible,” said Esther Colwill, senior manager, consulting, Deloitte.
Possible, yes, but for many women, breaking through the barriers they encounter as they navigate their course to the top can be daunting. It’s a point Sendall touched on during her speech to a largely female audience of 350 at a Women of Influence luncheon.
“What I get paid to do at Petro-Canada may seem somewhat unique and non-traditional,” Sendall told the crowd. “There are a lot of engineers in the oil industry, there are certainly lots of executives, but not a lot of them, unfortunately, are, at this point in time, women.”
Sendall later said that in nearly every meeting she goes to, the executives in the oil industry are all men.
In fact, it’s a bit of a surprise to walk into a room and find another women there, she said, “because it’s not the norm.”
Women a “pot of gold” for gaming industry
Video manufacturers are developing non-violent, easy-to-play games for females, who now make up 38 per cent of the market
Deborah Jian Lee, Reuters
Vancouver Sun – Saturday, October 04, 2008
Gina Sutton takes aim and deftly strikes down several targets in a row as they pop up on the screen in front of her.
A self-described girl gamer, she traveled from her home in Virginia to spend her 16th birthday at the Nintendo World Store in New York, and she can’t understand why anyone would think video games are just for boys.
“It’s like saying boys play with action figures and girls play with dolls,” she said as she used a Wii Zapper in a game called Link’s Crossbow Training. “I’m the girl who plays with action figures.”
With her nimble fingers and bubbling enthusiasm, she is one of a fast-growing posse of female gamers in the United States and elsewhere capturing the attention of video game makers—expanding the market beyond male-appeal games such as Grand Theft Auto.
Girls and young women are a “pot of gold” for the industry, said George VanHorn, senior analyst at market research firm IBISWorld. “The gaming industry has market characteristics that many would die for.”
According to IBISWorld, 38 per cent of U.S. gamers are female, up from 33 per cent in just five years.
From January through August of 2008 females ages 18 to 45 made up 28 per cent of the total industry revenue, ranking second to males ages 18 to 45, who made up 37 per cent.
Software makers have churned out a throng of non-violent, easy-to-play games in a bid to capture so-called casual gamers—those who don’t spend a lot of time on games—and women make up a big part of that target audience.
Companies have also snapped up smaller online game makers. Last year, Walt Disney Co. bought Kelowna, B.C.-based Club Penguin, which appeals to girls and boys aged six to 14. In 2005, Viacom Inc. bought Neopets Inc.
At the Nintendo World Store in New York this month, Fatima Gomez, 8, bounced from one game to the next, looking for short, easy ones and never spending long on one.
She likes Bratz, Disney Princess and Hannah Montana and she doesn’t like shooting games, said Oscar Gomez, her father, who brought his family from Mexico City on vacation.
“She doesn’t care if she wins or not. It’s different with this guy,” he said, pointing to his son. “They like to win.”
Females accounted for 21 per cent of the industry’s total sales growth last year, according to Anita Frazier, a video game industry analyst from the research firm NPD Group.
Frazier said many more females were playing than were showing up in these statistics. “The challenge is not to get them to play, but to get them to spend more of their time and money on games.”
One game that appeals to more girls than boys is Horseland, developed by Christina Johnson and her father, Phil Gerskovich.
When Johnson was 12, she stood at the kitchen table nearly every evening and lobbied her parents for a horse. While most parents might try to satisfy these demands with a stuffed animal or a day trip to the stables, Gerskovich created a horse avatar for his daughter.
The result was Horseland, an online pet game and social network, which they launched together in 1994. Today, Horseland lassos more than five million users, and has a line of merchandise and a partnership with DIC Entertainment for a CBS cartoon show.
Another factor that is making girls and women a greater force in gaming is the crossover of casual games from the online world to consoles like Nintendo’s Wii. According to market researcher NPD Group, as of July 2008, the fitness game Wii Fit had sold 1.4 million units in the United States since its launch in May, drawing large numbers of female gamers.
Activision’s Guitar Hero and Electronic Arts’ Rock Band, in which players perform in a virtual band on console systems such as the Wii, Sony Playstation or Microsoft Xbox, also appeal to young girls who enjoy the interactive nature of the games.
Electronic Arts also publishes the female-friendly blockbuster virtual life game The Sims, which has sold over 100 million copies worldwide since its launch in 2000.
“The expanded audience of women joining the gaming community is very exciting,” said Katie Cray, public relations manager for Nintendo of America. If current growth continues, the potential of the female market will only continue to expand, she said.
According to NPD Group, the top selling hardware in the United States in August was the Nintendo DS, a portable player which hosts girl-friendly games such as Nintendogs and Brain Age. Originally available in black or white, it now comes in metallic rose and silver.
Targeting the female market is part of the broad approach for the Sony Playstation console, according to Sony’s Julie Han. In addition to Rock Band, she said Sony is looking to release other “gender-defying” titles like Little Big Planet, a world-creation coming in October.
In the U.S. economic slowdown, much is riding on the female gamers, said Edward Williams, managing director of equity research at BMO Capital Markets.
“Publishers and developers need to create the right content that appeals to more girls in order to maintain the health of the industry,” Williams said.
Still, the video game industry is reasonably small and subject to the cycles of console and game launches rather than to the broader economic cycle, so it should continue to grow over the next two to three years, Williams said.
“As people travel less, the money spent on a video game is a little more justifiable,” he said. “It provides a fair amount of entertainment value per dollar spent.”
Meanwhile, some gamers lament that many female-focused games reinforce stereotypes and lack substantive content. Ubisoft Entertainment’s “Imagine” line of games, for Nintendo DS, targets preteen girls with titles such as Fashion Designer, Master Chef and Babyz, a game where girls overcome obstacles to becoming “the best babysitter on the planet!”
Only 11.5 per cent of the people designing games are female, according to the International Game Developers Association.
Didi Cardoso, managing editor of Grrlgamers.com, a video game review website produced by women, said that the trends in female-oriented games are pink boxes, fashion, cooking, babies and makeup. “I think a girl’s world is a little bigger than that,” she said.
Sutton, in New York to celebrate her sweet 16 at the Nintendo World Store on Sept. 12, said games that focused on cooking, fashion and babysitting were demeaning. Some of her favourite games are cartoon fighting game Super Smash Bros., racecar game Mario Kart and farm simulation game Harvest Moon.
Board member Linda Lanyon interviewed on CBC Radio 1’s “On The Coast” programme
Board member Linda Lanyon was interviewed on CBC Radio 1’s “On The Coast” programme about SCWIST and volunteering opportunities
Please find a link to the interview here.
Salmon farming objectors get their day in court
Harmful impact on wild fish stock numbers and ecotourism claimed
Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun
Published: Monday, September 29, 2008
Alexandra Morton will be in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver today for a four-day challenge of the provincial government’s constitutional right to regulate and approve fish farm locations.
Until recently, Morton has waged a solo upstream battle against the salmon-farming industry. Not any more.
She is being joined in court by the Wilderness Tourism Association, the Area E Gillnetters Association, the Fishing Vessel Owners Association and the Pacific Coast Wild Salmon Society. She specifically created the society to raise $60,000 to fund the court case.
Hundreds of individuals pledged donations in an adopt-a-fry campaign, Morton said. “I didn’t pursue big funders. I just wanted it to be from the people. They sent lots of messages: ‘Go get ‘em. Save our salmon’.”
The groups will argue in court that Ottawa—not the province—has constitutional authority over salmon farms.
They contend salmon farms interfere with navigation and are harmful to fish and fish habitat, and believe that closed-containment systems are a way to allow the industry to continue without damaging wild stocks.
The legal battle involves Norwegian-owned Marine Harvest, the biggest salmon farming operator on the B.C. coast.
Marine Harvest officials declined to comment on the case, but confirmed they operate 35 farms producing 45,000 tonnes of salmon per year, representing just over half of the industry’s total B.C. production.
The Wilderness Tourism Association squarely blames salmon farms for the collapse of pink salmon runs this year in the Broughton Archipelago and Knight Inlet, saying they are having a detrimental impact on top predators such as the grizzly bears and killer whales upon which ecotourism depends.
Craig Murray, owner of Nimmo Bay Resort, said this year’s returns are the lowest he’s seen in 25 years of fishing in the area and insists salmon farms are “causing irreparable damage to our wild salmon stocks.”
The Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, which provides independent advice to both senior governments on fish issues, concluded in its 2007 annual report: “In certain areas such as the Broughton Archipelago, salmon farms have acted as rearing and dispersal sites for sea lice which have harmed juvenile wild pink salmon runs in the Central Coast area.”
Morton, once a lonely voice in raising concerns about fish farms, now has a field station in the Broughton Archipelago, where scientists and budding young biologists from throughout Canada study the threat that salmon farms pose to wild stocks.
The 6.5-hectare research station site has just wrapped up its third year in operation, receiving up to 50 researchers and volunteers per season on a meagre annual budget of $40,000.
Most of the research involves the negative impact of sea lice from salmon farms on young salmon swimming out to sea, but there are also studies into the effect of salmon farms on sediments and flat fish. One unrelated study is looking at threatened marbled murrelets.
“They’re doing cutting-edge science,” Morton said of researchers from B.C.’s three major universities as well as Dalhousie in Halifax and the University of Alberta in Edmonton. “They are taking the research to another level.”
And Then There Was One - Exodus from Academia
A decade after 26 members of the entering class of 1991 earned their Ph.D.s from Yale’s elite molecular biophysics and biochemistry program, only one holds a tenured faculty position. But is an exodus from academia a bad thing?
Tricia Serio had been a big fish in the small, student-oriented biology department at Lehigh University in southeastern Pennsylvania. But could the daughter of a closeknit, working-class family in New Jersey, the f irst sibling to go away to college, make it as a graduate student at a research-intensive, Ivy League university?
Serio wasn’t the only one feeling insecure as she arrived at the summer orientation weekend put on by the molecular biophysics and biochemistry (MB&B) program at Yale University. The size of the incoming class of 1991 – with 30 students, it was more than twice the norm – had spawned a false rumor that the dean had accidentally mailed acceptance letters to dozens of students on the waiting list. The orientation was intended to ease those doubts among firstyear Ph.D. students. So after spending the day listening to MB&B faculty members talk about their research, Serio headed to the GPSCY (Graduate and Professional Student Center at Yale) bar on the New Haven campus to unwind and compare notes with her classmates.
That’s when the GPSCY cast its spell on her. Amid the low ceiling, concrete walls, cheap furniture, and spilt beer in this basement grad student hangout, Serio’s fears began to dissipate. Seeing how easily the “adults” – professors and older graduate students – mingled with people like herself at the bottom of the food chain, Serio decided that she might belong after all. I could be comfortable here, she thought.
She was right, and not just about graduate school. In her last year in the program, Serio married Jeffrey Laney, a third-year MB&B student she had met at the mixer. Then she did a postdoc with Susan Lindquist at the University of Chicago in Illinois and was hired by Brown University in 2002 (along with Laney, who comes up for tenure in 2009–10). Named a Pew Scholar in 2003, she received her f irst R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2006. And this spring, at the age of 38, she was awarded tenure.
Back at the GPSCY (which has since been upgraded and now bears the name Gryphon’s Pub), Dan Zimmer wasn’t having any trouble blending into his new surroundings. Maybe it was his undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and the 2 years he had spent doing summer research. In any event, Zimmer remembers feeling pretty confident about his ability to handle the coursework, pick a good lab, nail his thesis, and embark on an academic career.
Zimmer was midway through the MB&B program before he began to question whether that path was right for him. It wasn’t until his postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, that he realized Serio and other “academically bound” colleagues had a passion for independent research that he just didn’t share. “I don’t think I ever developed that trait,” he says. “I didn’t have a specific area of science that I loved and wanted to pursue.”
Sensing that the collaborative nature of industrial research would be a better match, Zimmer left Berkeley in 2001 and became the 50th employee of a fledgling biotech company in Cambridge. In April, the same month in which Serio got the news that cemented her academic status, Zimmer’s employer changed its name from Microbia to Ironwood to reflect its expanded mission to discover, develop, and market its own drugs. After a series of promotions, Zimmer is now in charge of the company’s drug-discovery program.
Coming from the University of Hawaii, where she had grown up as a fourthgeneration Filipino-American, Tammy Spain was thrilled at the chance to earn a doctoral degree from Yale. Meeting over drinks at
the GPSCY, she and Serio quickly became friends and f irstyear roommates, and both chose to study under virologist George Miller. Spain also became friends with Zimmer, and the two dated before they went their separate ways.
But unlike her two classmates, who have put down strong roots in academia and industry, respectively, Spain is still searching for her true path in science. After doing two postdocs and working in industry and for the public sector, Spain was hired this spring by the University of South Florida, Tampa, to manage a new center designed to help faculty members from many disciplines find commercial
applications for their work in detecting pathogens, diagnosing diseases, and targeted therapeutics. “I’m drawn to new things,” says Spain, who says the job lets her combine her knowledge of microbiology
with her real-world experience. “And I like to be where the action is.”
Choosing a career
On its Web site, the MB&B program declares that its mission is “to prepare students for careers as independent investigators in molecular and structural biology.” In academia, that typically means the ability to sustain a lab with peer-reviewed funding from NIH. The mission rests on the premise that the U.S. research enterprise, acknowledged as the finest in the world, affords anyone with sufficient talent and determination the chance to become a successful scientist. But that premise, a core tenet for academic biomedical researchers, has been sorely tested in recent years. They’ve watched the NIH budget, their most important source of funding, remain essentially flat for the past 5 years after doubling over the previous 6 years. That dismal funding picture has shrunk their already slim chances of obtaining the resources to become independent investigators. One unfortunate outcome, say community leaders, is that promising young scientists are being pushed out of academic research.
But is that true? Science decided to examine that argument by looking at the career paths of one group of young biomedical scientists who would seem to have an inside track on such jobs: the MB&B
class to which Serio, Zimmer, and Spain belong. Twenty-six of the 30 students who entered the elite program in September 1991 earned their Ph.D. degrees in 1997 or 1998 and have spent the next
decade spreading their wings. What are they – 13 men and 13 women – doing now? And what role did NIH’s funding roller coaster play in their decisions?
The answers come in 26 different flavors, and some of them might surprise you. Serio is the only graduate from the 1991 entering class who holds a tenured position. Five others are doing science in an academic setting, and a seventh is a university research administrator. But of those, only Matthew Goldberg, who in 2005 joined the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas as an assistant professor of neurology, currently has a tenure-track position. “When we started grad school, we all planned to go into academia and run our own labs,” recalls Kathy Seggerson Gleason, now an adjunct biology faculty member at a small, 4-year college outside Denver, Colorado, who says she’s currently “on hiatus” after adopting a child last year from China.
The small number in academic science doesn’t mean the rest of the graduates have turned their backs on the profession. Roughly two-thirds of the graduates are employed in the life sciences and are “using” their degrees. Of those, 11 are working in the biotechnology industry – four doing research, and seven holding a variety of administrative positions. There’s also a patent lawyer who works with
biotech companies. Three graduates have gone into the information technology sector. Science could not confirm the job status of three other graduates. Four class members left within the first year of the program, one after an internal investigation into allegations of scientific misconduct.
“I would have guessed that the percentage in tenure-track positions would be higher, maybe 20% to 25% [rather than 7%],” says Mark Solomon, an MB&B professor and director of graduate studies at Yale. “But we’re not just aiming for replacement faculty. That’s not the reality anymore. There are a lot of good opportunities out there.”
How many of the graduates would be in academic positions if the funding picture were brighter? That’s impossible to say with any certainty. But most MB&Bers; said they had other reasons for steering clear of academia. Some cited a strong interest in industry, and others mentioned family or personal reasons. Several say their training experiences soured them on following in their advisers’ footsteps.
For some MB&Bers;, academia was never really an option. “Even as an undergraduate in college, I never bought into the concept of being a professor,” says Deborah Kinch, associate director for regulatory
affairs at Biogen Idec in Cambridge. “Being a grad student is the last bastion of indentured servitude, and being a faculty member is pretty much the same thing, at least until you get tenure. Earning the same low salary and fighting for every grant – that was the last thing I wanted to do.”
Despite those reservations, Kinch and her classmates uniformly praise the training that they received. “Those were formative years for me, and I learned to think independently,” says Jennifer Holmes, now a patent attorney at Ropes & Gray LLP in Boston, who has been friends with Kinch since their undergraduate days at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and who worked alongside her in Solomon’s cell cycle lab. “A Ph.D. is highly valued in this field. It’s definitely opened doors for me.”
The road to New Haven
Although they come from different backgrounds, the members of the 1991 MB&B class share a love for science that goes back to childhood. Tori Williams Reid, one of three students on an NIH-funded MARC (Minority Access to Research Careers) fellowship, recalls getting first a microscope and then a chemistry set from her mother. “She had no familiarity with science, but she must have perceived something in me,” says Reid, who joined Accenture, the global consulting giant, shortly after graduation and moved around the country on a series of corporate assignments. In July, Reid left the company to start a home-care business for seniors.For most MB&Bers;, pursuing a career in science meant striking off on one’s own. “If I hadn’t gotten into the University of Illinois, I’d probably be making tractors,” says Brian DeDecker, a research
assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. DeDecker grew up in a small Midwestern town and was the f irst in his family to go to college. One exception is Jing Xu, who helps life science companies develop their business plans as an independent consultant based in San Diego, California. Studying science was the equivalent of going into the family business, she says. “Both my parents are chemists, and I grew up [in Xiamen, China] with the expectation that I would go into science.”
Once the record-sized class descended on Yale in the fall of 1991, they began to worry that some of them weren’t supposed to be there. To help convince herself that she belonged, Julia Pinsonneault says she took the first-year coursework very seriously. “I was obsessed with my grades,” confesses Pinsonneault, who last month ended what she calls “the world’s longest postdoc” – an 11-year ordeal – by becoming a research scientist in the pharmacology department at Ohio State University in Columbus. Chad Brautigam, a research scientist in the structural biology laboratory at UT Southwestern, says he went a bit in the opposite direction. “By the second semester, I was burnt out. I had worked really hard as an undergraduate, and I was so tired of taking tests that I let things go a little.”
Goldberg, who had taken a year off to work in a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) lab at Harvard University, was chagrined to find that his undergraduate physics degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, had left him unprepared to grasp the secrets of living cells. “All of a sudden I had to learn biochemistry and cellular biology and genetics,” he notes. He and a few other MB&Bers; even took an undergraduate biochem course to catch up.
To help each other out, the class met regularly for informal study sessions in which they pooled their knowledge. “The biophysics was a challenge for me,” recalls William Russ, now an assistant professor in the pharmacology department at UT Southwestern, who was a biochemistry major at Cornell University. “Fortunately, I had some friends from physics who struggled with memorizing the molecular biology but who loved the equations.” In contrast, most MB&Bers; say their professors weren’t much help. “It came so easy to them, they didn’t know how to explain it to somebody who didn’t
already understand,” says Spain.
In addition to taking a full load of courses, first-class MB&B students were required to do three 10-week lab rotations covering both molecular biophysics and biochemistry. The rotations gave students
a chance to dip their toes into both wet and dry science and helped prepare them for qualifying exams in both areas. The large size of the 1991 class made the normal jockeying for spots even more intense.
In October, the class went on a departmental retreat at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. Cowed by the subject matter, Russ was planning a “token” rotation in biophysics when his eventual adviser, Donald Engleman, a structural biologist, pulled him aside and gave him a piece of career advice that he’s never forgotten. “ ‘You have a question, and you learn what you need to learn to answer it,’ he told me,” Russ recalls. “Everything I’ve done since the MB&B program is an extension of that conversation.”
What Peter Kosa, now director of business development at XOMA, a northern California biotech company, learned in his first year was that he needed to take a year off. “I fell in love with structural biology after seeing these tremendous 3D pictures of molecules interacting with each other,” he says about his decision to join the lab of Paul Sigler, a senior scientist with an impressive track record who had recently joined the Yale faculty. But Kosa had also fallen in love with a former classmate at Swarthmore College, where he had majored in biochemistry. After getting married, the couple decided they
wanted to spend a year together “living somewhere we haven’t lived before.”
Kosa knew that he was bucking the odds. But after obtaining Sigler’s backing and approval from the department, he spent a year working in an HIV lab at the University of Utah. True to his word, he returned in 1993 and 5 years later completed his Ph.D.
Settling into a lab
Although most students say they were able to get into the lab of their choice, those relationships weren’t necessarily lasting ones or even helpful to their careers. “I wanted to work on solid-state NMR, which was still fairly new, and I picked a young faculty member,” says DeDecker. “But the project, which was really more of a technique, didn’t go anywhere.” DeDecker blames himself for the misstep.“I’m not very politically savvy. I just wanted to find something that was cool and that interested me.” Learning from that experience, he then joined Sigler’s lab.
Macarena Parra, a payload scientist for life science missions at NASA Ames Research Center in northern California, says she got off to a rocky start under David Gonda, a young scientist just setting up his yeast lab, and never fully recovered. Not only was the project a stretch for a graduate student, she says in retrospect, but she missed the collegial, interdisciplinary research atmosphere she had enjoyed as an undergraduate at Rensselaer PolytechnicInstitute working in General Electric’s corporate lab in Schenectady, New York. “Everybody at Yale had their disciplinary blinders on,” she says. She also hated the treadmill existence they seemed to lead.
Unbeknownst to Parra, and in the midst of her training, Gonda began studying for a master’s degree in computer and information science. In 1998, he left Yale to join industry and is now doing computational research applied to risk management for The Hartford, a Connecticut-based financial services company. “I guess I should have added two and two together,” says Parra.
Joseph Toth, a senior scientist at Adnexus Therapeutics, a Waltham, Massachusetts, biotech owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb, rotated through Gonda’s lab before settling in with Mark Biggin, another young faculty member who left Yale and is a staff scientist in the genomics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “It was an eye opener for me,” says Toth. “It was discouraging to see what they were going through, and it reinforced my feeling that maybe I didn’t want to do that.”
Toth has still lived that experience through his wife, Rachelle Gaudet, who was 2 years behind him in the MB&B program and now holds a tenure-track position in molecular and cellular biology at Harvard.
“We decided that it wasn’t a good idea for both of us to be struggling with grants and an academic lab,” he says. “And it’s worked out pretty well.”
A young, enthusiastic mentor can also be an asset, however. Athena Nagi, a principal scientist at Amgen in Longmont, Colorado, worked under Lynne Regan, who had come to Yale a year earlier to pursue fundamental questions about protein folding. “She was more hands-on and spent more time in the lab” than many senior faculty members, Nagi says of Regan, now a full professor in the department. Regan also taught her not to expect the same technology to solve every problem – a valuable lesson that she’s tried to apply at each of the four biotech companies at which she has worked. “In industry, the goal is to use whatever [tool] will get you an answer,” says Nagi, currently a team leader for a late-stage clinical monoclonal antibody therapeutic.
Long before she graduated, Kinch had decided that the MB&B program would mark the end of her academic career. Her experience as Solomon’s first graduate student reinforced that decision. “It was pretty stressful,” she says, “watching someone who was under such tremendous pressure to publish, to get his NIH grant renewed, and to do everything else that he needed to keep the lab going.” Solomon says his students typically know when he’s applying for a grant “because I’m asking them for data. But I try not to stress them, since I’m not sure there is much that they can do” to help
with the proposal.
Whereas Zimmer says he spent the last few years at Yale “trying to decide what I wanted to do,” Serio never wavered from her decision to pursue a life in academic research. “I always knew what I wanted to work on,” she says. “I didn’t think about the long-term, career consequences. I just wanted to do it.”
Serio says Miller built up her confidence by encouraging her to be independent while remaining accessible. “He’s my biggest cheerleader, next to my father,” she says. But Miller, a prominent cancer virologist who at 71 still maintains an active lab, refuses to take any credit. “Her independence was probably something that happened when she was 4,” he jokes. “Trish was very self-directed. Both she and Tammy worked on difficult problems that are still not solved. And both did lovely work. But Trish was probably more determined to set out on her own.”
The next steps
Midway through their graduate training, a few MB&Bers; hatched the idea of a seminar series to hear from former graduates working outside the academic fold. Nagi said the group wrestled with the definition of an alternative career and decided that the answer was, in essence, “anything that didn’t involve teaching at a major research university.”
The speakers held jobs as diverse as running a seed company, remediating brownfield sites, and working as an undercover FBI agent. Although Spain says she enjoyed hearing them talk about their work, what Spain remembers most were their reasons for branching out. “They all said they didn’t want to go into academia. None of them said, ‘I failed.’ None had even tried to find an academic job. It was the first time I got the sense that there was no shame in not going into academia.”
That heightened sense of empowerment reinforced what some class members were already feeling. “At first, you think that academia makes sense,” says Nagi. “But by your 3rd or 4th year, you start to get the lay of the land and look at the options. You realize that a postdoc isn’t just for 1 year and that there are multiple postdocs.”
Eager to apply her knowledge to helping treat and cure diseases, Nagi was chagrined to learn that her Ph.D. wasn’t seen as sufficient training for a career in the field. “I was talking with someone from Merck who seemed very interested in my work,” she recalls about one job fair she attended as a graduate student. “But then she realized I wasn’t a postdoc, and she said, ‘I don’t see any reason to continue talking with you.’That’s when I realized there is a prescribed path that people were supposed to follow, for no good reason.” Regan, her former adviser, says that Nagi’s decision not to do a postdoc “was very unusual, because the assumption is that anyone who wants a science-related job will do one. But it worked out for her.”
To Kinch, the idea of moving lockstep into an academic postdoc “started to look like a trap.” But avoiding that trap also required a bit of luck. “Biogen had just begun a postdoc program, and it was being handled by the temp agency that I was working for,” she recalls. “They had just posted it, and I went for an interview and got hired that day.” A year later, she was hired as a fulltime employee.
Kosa remembers how his initial excitement about being a graduate student faded as he soldiered through his doctoral program. “At the beginning, they are paying you to go to school, and you think, ‘Wow, what could be better?’But by the end, it just seems like a low-paying job.”
Kosa’s days as an academic scientist were numbered once, as a postdoc at Harvard, he got a taste of the burgeoning biotech industry in and around Cambridge. “I wanted to understand the nonscientific side of the biotech industry, and my work was too basic to be applied,” he says. So he left Harvard and enrolled in an MBA program at the MIT Sloan School of Management, turning a student project into a biotech start-up that performed liver toxicity testing with a technology billed as a “liver on a chip.” Upon graduation, he counseled venture capitalists looking to invest in the biotech industry, and in 2006,
he joined Bayer HealthCare before moving last month to XOMA.
The idea of going to law school f irst occurred to Holmes midway through her graduate training after a patent lawyer described her work at one of the alternative- career seminars. But it would be several years until Holmes acted on that impulse, and only after she had tested the waters by working as a patent agent for a law firm.
“I had wanted to be a scientist for as long as I can remember,” she says. “So it was scary when I started to second-guess myself.” Working and going to school fulltime, Holmes received her law degree in 2004 and joined the patent division of Ropes & Gray. “I didn’t hate my project,” she says about her work on kinase substrates in Solomon’s lab. “It was more of a realization that most of science is about making small contributions. Not everybody can cure cancer or even get the cover of Science or Nature.”
Committed to a career in academia, DeDecker has struggled to move up the academic ladder. But NIH’s budget has been the least of his obstacles. “The way to get a job is to have a famous person say [about you] that ‘this is the best person I’ve seen in the last 40 years.’Unfortunately, I haven’t been very good luck for senior scientists.”
At Yale, he studied crystallography under Sigler, who in January 2000 died after suffering a heart attack while walking to work. DeDecker says a decision to “learn something new” after his Ph.D. and to do it at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. has also hurt him professionally. “I’m really glad I did it,” he says about his 2-year postdoc in protein engineering. “But going abroad is a bit of a career killer. I had to start over again when I came back to the States.”
For his second postdoc, DeDecker joined crystallographer Don Wiley at Harvard’s new Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology, which planned to do large-scale screening of small molecules. “It was a grand plan, and it looked like a good thing,” he says. But DeDecker admits that he had a hard time “finding my place.” And tragically, in November 2001, Wiley died after falling off a bridge over the Mississippi River while attending a scientific conference in Memphis, Tennessee.
Learning from their mistakes
Several members of the MB&B class were faced with some tough choices as they sought to carve out their scientific niche. In 2001, Spain moved to south Florida with her physician husband – they have since divorced – so that he could establish his practice. “In coming down here, I pretty much knew that I was giving up an academic research position,” she says.
She left the door ajar, however, by taking a second postdoc. “I was developing preliminary data that I hoped to use to write up an R01 application,” she explains. “But the person I was working under had run into funding problems, and the lab was limping along with only one NIH grant. So he decided to incorporate my work in his next application. I don’t really fault him. What else could he do?”
That experience pushed her into the arms of industry. “If I’m going to work my butt off, I want to be in control,” she recalls thinking. She posted her resume online, where it was picked up by a recruiter for a south Florida company that was setting up a molecular biology unit to develop military sensors that would detect biological contaminants in the environment. The resulting negotiations were a refreshing change from academia, she says. “I asked for double my salary [$66,000], and they gave it to me,” she says.
Kinch was already ensconced at Biogen when professional disaster struck. A member of the scientific team that had sought government approval for the anti-inflammatory drug Tysabri, Kinch arrived at work one morning in February 2005 to discover that the company had suddenly pulled it from the market after three patients taking it to treat multiple sclerosis developed a rare neurological condition. “It was very demoralizing. But it’s part of the business, and you roll with the punches.” Tysabri was subsequently remarketed with restrictions on its use, and in 2006, Kinch decided she wanted to learn more about the regulatory side of the business. “We pretend that we’re the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] reviewers, and we try to spot holes in the data,” she says about her current position.
“It’s a lot of fun.”
For Nobuyuki Ota, the death of a colleague thrust him into the role of CEO of A-CUBE Inc., a small Burlingame, California–based start-up company that is using computer models to design novel monoclonal antibodies. Trained as a bioinformaticist under Axel Brunger at Yale, Ota had met the company’s founder, Hisaaki Kawakatsu, while working on ligand recognition as a postdoc in David
Agard’s biophysics and biochemistry lab at the University of California, San Francisco. Their conversation had stimulated Ota’s interest in “modifying the biology and health of an organism,” in other words, finding clinical applications for what he had been doing at a molecular level. Returning to Japan to tend to his ailing parents, Ota began looking for venture capital to launch the company. Soon after,
Kawakatsu was diagnosed with cancer. When he died a year later, in 2006, Ota took the reins.
Before starting A-CUBE, Ota says he turned down two tenuretrack university offers because they were in bioinformatics, “and I’m more interested now in antibody medicine.” He also prefers what he regards as the greater transparency of commercial research. “In academia, some of the papers are not reliable and the f indings are not reproducible,” he says. “In industry, if you don’t make a very good antibody, there are tests that can prove it doesn’t work. So you have to be honest.”
Parra says she tries to be honest with herself in assessing her career options. Part of a team from government, industry, and academia that last year successfully launched GeneSat-1, a miniaturized
biological package tucked aboard another payload, she’s learned to cope with both the pressure and the tenuous nature of her position. “There’s always the fear of budget cuts,” she says, noting that at one point she and her colleagues would receive layoff notices every other Friday, only to have them rescinded on Monday.
Right now, she likes what she’s doing – PharmaSat, her current project, is due to go up later this year – enough to stick with it and see what happens. “I’ve mellowed. I’ve decided to stay and wait for the pink slip.” Losing her job would be hard, but there would at least be a small silver lining, she says: It would give her more time to work on a two-passenger biplane that she and her boyfriend are building.
Doing whatever it takes
Goldberg, who studies Parkinson’s disease and has developed a strain of knockout mice that helps him explore its molecular pathways, has always been a realist in assessing what it will take to carve out a career in academic research. That approach has meant both deliberate zigzags and some serendipitous turns along the way.
After working on protein aggregation in Arthur Horwich’s NMR lab at Yale, he chose to do a postdoc with Jie Shen, then a new assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “I wanted to do something more applied,” he explains. “Neurodegeneration was the logical next step to put my thesis to work. And with the growth in the aging population and the increase in neurodegenera neurodegenerative diseases, I figured I should enter a field that would be in demand.”
One week before he joined Shen’s lab, however, she called with some surprising news: “She said a mutation of the gene I had been studying is the first that has been linked to Parkinson’s.” Goldberg, a protein biochemist, suddenly needed to know a lot about mice genetics. And as a postdoc, he was in a perfect position to do so. “I learned the techniques, and then I trained everybody else.”
That clear-eyed recognition of what’s needed to get the job done is part of the reason fellow MB&Bers; said that they were not surprised to learn that Goldberg and Serio are the only members of the 1991 class to hold tenured or tenure-track positions. “Tricia was always a very driven, type-A personality,” recalls DeDecker. “She’s a very good scientist, but she also knows the business of science, what it
takes to get into the right lab, in a hot field, and get the best out of the situation. I also give Matt lots of credit for branching out and changing fields.”
DeDecker is hoping that a tenuretrack position will open up within his department. Russ says that he’s thinking of looking this fall for a tenure-track position that would begin as early as the 2009–10 academic year. Neither has abandoned their original dreams of running their own labs. But both men have no illusions about what it will take to succeed. “I’m putting in an NIH grant, although realistically,
my chances are awful,” says DeDecker. “If I calculated the odds, I’d have to stop. But you just have to have some sort of faith in your ability.” Goldberg is even more convinced that the payoff will come. “The most important thing is to keep applying,” he says.
Serio, the only one from the class of 1991 who’s hit that particular jackpot, epitomizes that nose-to-the-grindstone attitude. In an e-mail to Science the day after learning she had been recommended for tenure, she admitted sheepishly that the news was a bit anticlimactic. “I kept thinking that I would sleep well if this happened. But I was up working until one [a.m.] last night. Some habits die hard, I guess.”
–JEFFREY MERVIS
VOL 321 SCIENCE
Your Research in the Headlines: Dealing with the Media
Talking to journalists for the first time is often a sink-or-swim experience, but preparation can improve the odds that your scientific work is disseminated accurately to the public.
Final-year Ph.D. student Molly Crockett got more than she bargained for when her first-author paper was published in Science last June. Her university circulated an embargoed press release about a week before publication, and within a couple of hours, “I started getting tons of e-mails and phone calls” from journalists, Crockett says. All told, she appeared in four radio or podcast interviews, a dozen newspaper stories, and five magazine articles. “The week the research went out [was] pretty much devoted 9 to 5 to dealing with the press,” she says. It was “crazy.”
Crockett received some coaching from her supervisor and feels she prepared for her interviews fairly well. Still, entering the limelight was “a sink-or-swim learning experience.” That hardly makes her unique; few scientists have the luxury of training before they confront the media for the first time. Yet an understanding of how the media work, an awareness of what could go wrong, and a bit of preparation can help you deal with a sudden tide of media interest and ensure that your scientific work is disseminated accurately to the public.
See the full article by Elisabeth Pain here.
Wed Feb 01
