Every scientist wants to be an iconoclast, but most end up doing rather conventional work. Understandably, because it takes a special sort of nerve to risk your career and reputation on an idea or approach that could be very, very wrong - so wrong that it would be tough to recover from.

Yes, it's possible, according to John Hawks (who writes an excellent blog):

OK, I'm about to dive into an issue I probably shouldn't be talking about on a blog, at least if I have any hope of convincing a hiring committee to consider me, but I'm going to dumbly rush ahead.

John Tierney at the NY Times has been looking into the issue of whether Congress is considering "Title IX'ing" science, by requiring some sort of gender quota in funding decisions by federal science agencies. Tierney argues that in this day and age, it is less a matter of discrimination and more a matter of which subjects women choose to pursue:

"The members of Congress and women’s groups who have pushed for science to be “Title Nined” say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women’s interest in some fields isn’t the same as men’s."

I just got my hands on a recent book by two influential biologists, Marc Kirschner, chair of Harvard's recently created Systems Biology Department, and John Gerhart, a professor at UC Berkeley.

Dividing is one of the trickiest things a cell has to do. The cell needs to faithfully copy its entire genome, with very few mistakes, and it needs to then divvy up those two genome copies equally among the two new cells that are created during division. Going through this process is a bit like going down a double black diamond ski run: once you set things in motion, there's no stopping until you get to the end.

In the case of cell division, there are two critical points of no return: at the decision to start replicating DNA, and when it's time to equally split up the chromosomes. A cell that's going to copy its genetic material had better be ready, with all the necessary supplies in hand, because once the copying process initiates, it's a bad idea to stop: a cell can't really do much with a half-replicated genome, and it's in danger of permanently ruining its genome. And it doesn't do you any good to successfully finish that copying process, only to misallocate what you've copied among the two daughter cells. Without the right chromosomes in each cell, there is only a slim chance of survival.

So how do cells make these critical decisions?

"Can scientists and journalists learn to beat the doubt industry before our most serious problems beat us all?" This is the question asked in an interesting piece at a news? site I've never heard of - "Miller-McCune: Turning Research Into Solutions." I'm not sure about the research and solutions thing, but they do have some interesting comments about the "Doubt Industy."

"Doubt Industry" means organized interests with a strong motivation to get the public to question science: the link between smoking and cancer, the scientific status of evolution, the health hazards of beryllium (apparently a problem for workers in the atomic industry). Whenever scientific results cause problems for someone, especially someone with a strong financial incentive to not believe the science, the time-tested strategy is to question the certainty of the science. A well-known internal memo from one cigarette company in the 1960's famously claimed(PDF):

We like to talk about the amazingly complex machinery of the cell: flagella that resemble finely tuned outboard motors, or complex information processing circuits that help a cell process information about its environment. Biologists work hard at understanding how these systems work. They will take a wiring diagram like the following, and ask why is it set up this way?

A report in this week's issue of Science describes a set of genes that enable members of the bacterial species Proteus mirabilis to tell the difference between kin and strangers. The bacteria engage in a social behavior (common to teenagers and bacteria) called swarming: they like to get together in groups. If you spread these bacteria on a petri dish, they are able to move together to form a colony.

The catch is this: like humans, bacteria of the same species can be divided up into smaller populations of more closely related individuals.

Continuing my science policy blogging streak (we'll get back to real science here soon, I promise!), it's worth noting Washington Post columnist George Will's recent piece about our "perverse national policy of expelling talented people."

If you've spent any time recently around America's science PhD programs, you'll have heard about the problem: we bring talented people in from all over the world, train them to do great science, and then make it impossible for them to get a job here, even when US companies and universities want to hire them. As George Will writes, this creates yet one more incentive for US companies to send their operations outside of the US:

But one reason Microsoft opened a software development center in Vancouver [Canada] is that Canadian immigration laws allow Microsoft to recruit skilled people it could not retain under U.S. immigration restrictions.

Over the last few years, we've seen some bitter political arguments over the role of US Government scientists, political appointees, and the manipulation of technical reports. I'm not going to wade into that fight here, except for one point: occasionally we hear the argument that government scientists are employees of the executive branch, and that they are therefore legitimately subject to the efforts of the President and his appointees to get everybody on board with the President's agenda.

For many positions in the federal government, that argument is correct. If you work for the executive branch, ultimately the President is your boss. But in many cases, especially ones that concern some government scientists, there is a limit to what the President and his political appointees can do, because the role of those scientists has been established by law. Congress has sensibly written several laws to ensure that the government can get sound, unbiased technical advice, free from political manipulation.

Over at the Panda's Thumb, Nick Matzke weighs in on how scientists should respond to Creationist criticisms that we know nothing about abiogenesis - the origins of the first living systems from non-living systems.

Matzke correctly says that the typical response is two-fold: scientists will say that a) sure, we don't know much about it, but we're working on it, and b) it has nothing to do with the main field of evolutionary biology. Matzke says that

It is high time all of these statements be discarded or highly modified. They are basically lazy, all-too-easy responses relying on hair-splitting technicalities or nearly philosophical assertions of the “even if the creationists were empirically correct on this point, which they aren’t but I’m too busy to back it up right now, it wouldn’t matter” variety. And the worst part is that these sorts of statements mis-describe the actual state of the science among the people who work in the field. It is simply not true that we, the scientific community, know almost nothing about the OOL (what an individual who spent a career working on fossils or fruit flies or speciation might know personally is a different question).

I agree with much of what Matzke has to say, but disagree with him that it's wrong for scientists to say that origins of life/abiogenesis research is a substantially different field from mainstream evolutionary biology.

I've been traveling, often with three whining kids in the back seat of a cramped car - not the best environment for blogging. On part of this trip, we toured this not so well known, but spectacular site:

I'll be impressed if any readers recognize the place - give it your best shot in the comments, if you think you know where it is.

The real subject for today is virtue and scientists: is the ideal scientist a disinterested, virtuous seeker of knowledge? Do academic scientists embody this ideal, and are corporate scientists sell-outs?

Harvard historian Steven Shapin shares his ideas in an interview with the Boston Globe.

The interview is a brief plug for Shapin's upcoming book. Shapin says the wrong way to think about science in academia is with

the presumption is that this is about the unequal distribution of virtue, about threats to the autonomy, integrity, value, and authenticity of science, represented by commercializing interests.

From over at Wired

Multitasking is detrimental to how we learn according to two interesting pieces which discuss recent neurological studies of multitasking, in The Atlantis, and in The Atlantic (yes, those are two different magazines). In one study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a study participant wrote:

"I multitask every single second I am online,” confessed one study participant. “At this very moment I am watching TV, checking my e-mail every two minutes, reading a newsgroup about who shot JFK, burning some music to a CD, and writing this message."

Does this sound like you? It sure sounds like me sometimes (and it's the same way at work, if you replace the JFK newsgroup and TV with reading a science paper, answering email, and doing a Western blot), and personally I think this fragmented way of working leads to a very superficial way of working.

A new report at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has some recommendations about science advice for the next president. The rationale for this report is that:

The next President will need a superb Assistant for Science and Technology—not
only to evaluate complex issues and develop sound policies but also
to guide and oversee the federal investment in science and technology,
which totaled some $142 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2008.

Chief among the recommendations is to restore the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to the higher status of "Assistant to the President." The OSTP director position was demoted during the Bush administration, and filling that position was a low priority, resulting in a long delay before the current OSTP Director, Jack Marburger was appointed.

This report is essentially saying that the next president should signal that good science policy is a priority, by giving the President's science advisor cabinet status, and by making the appointment early in the new administration. To back up this recommendation, the report's authors have brought together an armful of statements on Presidential science advice by former key players, including Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, Al Gore, and many former Presidential Science Advisors, such as George Keyworth, Ronald Regan's first science advisor:

What does it take to get a job in science, and what role do universities play? There has been some discussion of these issues in the blogging community lately (here, here, and my thoughts are here). Being on the inside, it doesn't seem that complicated to me, but to someone considering a career in science, choosing a college, or just starting college, it can seem very confusing. On occasion I supervise undergraduate summer students, and from their questions, it's clear students aren't so sure about what job opportunities there are in science, and what educational pathways are involved in getting those jobs.