How can researchers, scientists, and engineers reclaim our role as society's pioneers and leaders?
Think of Einstein, Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Curie. These names will echo through the centuries—far outlasting those of many presidents and politicians.
I’m not saying that it’s all about recognition and fame—which are ephemeral and never truly satisfying. I’m talking about doing things that positively impact humanity, sometimes with the side effect of recognition.
Asking good questions and solving important problems that we’re on the planet to do. That’s what we spent years (or decades, in my case) training to do. We didn’t just hop on one of the easy bandwagons, like becoming an influencer or financial player. No, we chose the hard path—because for some crazy reason, we cared about the science, about improving the world, and about understanding how the world works and using that to enlighten people.
Yet somewhere along the way, things have gone awry. Scientists are not seen in the positive way we once were. There has been too much anti-climate change propaganda—not helped by the pro-climate change propaganda—and too many scientists portrayed as soulless villains in popular culture. Somewhere along the way, people started resenting us.
(Which is genuinely funny—it’s like they didn’t notice that we’re the ones who toil away for years, or decades of training to even get a paying position where we can afford a basic house and a car, while they take shortcuts to get those things much earlier, even if the shortcut is lots of debt.)
Not everyone has it in for us, but unfortunately too many people do.
And if we’re honest, taking a moment to reflect, how good are most of us as exemplars of a way of being? Are we positive, uplifting people simply striving to share our great ideas and insights with the world?
Or are we running on a fxxxing treadmill of churning out one incremental paper after the next, to prove our worth to tenure committees and reviewers? Are we chasing the next bread crumb of funding by submitting an endless stream of hastily-written grants, hoping the lottery gods will bless us with their scarce fortune?
If that sounds like your day-to-day life (under an admittedly harsh light), I get it. We are all under big, systemic pressures to perform in this way.
Where do those pressures come from? Who decided on this system we have in academic research today? Did an external force dictate to us a science career consisting mostly of playing a meaningless game of endless paper and grant churning, while failing to communicate clearly the value and power of the science we’re pursuing?
Nope. We did this to ourselves.
And that is GOOD news, because it means we have the power to undo it.
But time is short, my friends. The anti-science people have sniffed out our inefficiency and not-so-productive ways of being, and want to penalize us for it. (And probably for a lot of other things that we can get into some other time.)
They’re gaining political power, and they’re going to use it. If we don’t clean up our act on our own terms, then it WILL be an external force soon forcing us to change.
I understand the argument that we shouldn’t comply in advance or cower before these dark forces—and that’s not what I’m suggesting. But I’d like to point out that we have LOTS of baggage. We are inefficient, slow, and often not very productive because of all the bureaucracy, games, and endless laurel-seeking that we do rather than focusing on doing great science. Remember, WE created this system for ourselves. And only we can fix it.
If we don’t, someone else will try to. And whether it’s the current gang of politicians or some future gang, it is highly unlikely we’ll just fly under the radar. We receive over $30 billion per year from the National Institutes of Health alone, and a figure that size is going to attract attention when an oversized Federal budget must be balanced.
What can we do to to fix our situation?
We have to start by recognizing that we can never force change on other people, at least not in any lasting way. History has proven, over and over again, that we humans resist external pressure to change—**even if the change is for our own good.** Just think of someone forcing you to never eat chocolate cake again. If someone did that to me, I’d be eating more of it, not less!
So, what then? If we can’t change others (and that’s what “the system” is) the only thing left is to change ourselves.
We can communicate better. We can focus more on what actually matters. We can better appreciate the freedom we’ve been given. And so many more things I’ll talk about later.
But we have to decide, among ourselves, that we desire change—or it WILL be forced on us in ways that won’t be what we’d chose.
—
One of the ways we can change how we communicate and position our science for real impact is by shifting our approach to grant writing.
You heard me right: grant writing is not just an annoying hoop to jump through—it’s a powerful agent of change we can use to shape the way we want do science! If you’re curious to join the conversation, just comment “send video” or DM me and I’ll send you the link to a new training about more engaging, effective grant writing… and much more.
