Sense and Salami Science

The last few days have been pretty rough. Perhaps the thing I hate the most about starting in a new lab is picking up other people's projects where they left off. I hate trying to decipher protocols that have been tweaked, or "refined" across hundreds of rounds of experiments and across multiple labs at various stages of evolution. I hate trying to find the original authors of those cryptic sets of instructions so that I can ask them about vague generalities or the equations they used in their calculations because mine don't seem to make any logical sense at all.


Above all else, I despise the software they leave behind to analyze their data! Their minds always work through problems differently than my own and since I generally haven't seen software package x before, of course I'm going to be asking people where the user manual is...

What do you mean "there is no manual?" How in the world are you supposed to learn how to use this program? Oh, I see... You haven't ever used it yourself so you really have no clue either. Do you know who I can ask? I know you're really busy and I'm sorry my intellectual repertoire doesn't include clairvoyance but my PI wanted this done immediately and...

If you haven't ever worked in a research lab before, you might think this sort of thing was a unique case-- It isn't. I've been through over a half dozen labs and it's always the same thing. It pretty much boils down to the fact that no research project ever starts from the very beginning. Everything we do heralds back to earlier projects and those projects were based on someone else's work before theirs, etc. Those old projects don't even have to be similar or even support each other. For instance, I've been instructed to review a lot of papers published by the my last lab but not for the purpose of mimicking what they did with a few slight improvements. Actually, the changes we are looking into are really quite dramatic and in some ways contradict previously-made assumptions.

Scientific research in general has become less about the quintessential "eureka" moments and earth-shattering discoveries and more about taking smaller, less risky steps and publishing as many papers as you can. In fact, there's a name for the kind of research that gets scattered across multiple publications when it really could have been covered by just one; “salami science“. There should also be a term to encompass superficial publications that just barely scrape across broad surfaces without going into any real depth. So, I’m tentatively proposing the term, “skimmed science”. If a better term already exists and I don’t know about it, please by all means, let me know.

My office came in really handy today. I could pace, swear, cry and mutter to myself all day long with the door shut so I didn't bother anyone else while I tried to make sense of everything. Wednesday, I told myself I just needed a good night's sleep so I could facilitate that breakthrough on Thursday. On Thursday, when the breakthrough didn't come, I told myself that I was just really fried because I'd had 2 bad days in a row. By the time this morning rolled around, I was completely ready to pitch my annoying little side-project out the window (along with my laptop).

I managed to turn in something at the end of the day but whether or not it makes any sense remains to be seen. I fully expect to have to re-do that particular experiment over again and I’m told it’s not uncommon when you’re just starting out. I just hope it doesn’t take me as long to sort out as it did my predecessor. Like all other first-year grad students around the world, I have big plans, lofty goals and great expectations. Seriously, who has time for this?

For more on “Salami Science”, read this article.