Important additional context on this… TLDR is that the post is only a “feel-good” post and misrepresented reality; real life is a lot more nuanced and fucked up
Mary E Brunkow solely worked in industry (a.k.a. the scientific slang for working in something like a pharmaceuticals cpmpany) after her PhD, instead of in academia like most Nobel Prize laureates. Industry researchers rarely publish. And 34 published papers may seem low by Nobel standards but is a lot. I don’t think I personally know any industry researchers that are this prolific; some full professors even don’t have this many papers
The bigger takeaway from this story is not “anyone can make it” if they have a good idea… Brunkow was extremely prolific as a researcher. A better takeaway may be instead of focusing on an individual solution, systematically why academia has such an excessive focus on publication metrics; people are trying to move away from it which is good. Another thing: her old company (Celltech) went defunct in 2004 and Brunkow was allegedly laid off (and no one at the time realized the importance of her discovery) which is probably a better take home message
Her Wikipedia page as reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_E._Brunkow.
Also some discussion about this on r/labrats if anyone wants to go over to the forbidden site: https://reddit.com/r/labrats/comments/1o1pgo1/mary_e_brunkow_one_of_this_years_nobel_prize
Also some discussion about this on r/labrats if anyone wants to go over to the forbidden site:
I went. It was a mistake. Most comments were about how this post was written by ChatGPT followby how they’d love to have 34 publications. There were a couple taking about what you wrote, but I think your comment captures the best of it.
Hah wow. Thanks for putting that into context.
The three pathways for most academics
Option 1 - shit out a large pile of bad (either misleading, over-sensationalised, or just clearly partial work) papers, but get funding to do the same for another year.
Option 2 - work hard to create a quality paper, run out of time, no more funding, off you go to industry.
Option 3 - take a teaching intensive role and never have any time for research, oh and also get paid less than in industry.
No one was mentioning what Mary Elizabeth Brunkow did. Mary Elizabeth Brunkow (born 1961) is an American molecular biologist and immunologist. She is known for co-identifying the gene later named FOXP3 as the cause of the scurfy mouse phenotype, a finding that became foundational for modern regulatory T cell biology.
Thanks for posting the comment I was looking for
alot of phds are just making paper after paper which could be considered low quality, just to have thier CV presentable. if you paper has nothing valuable or its an exact clone of another paper, its not really innovative, ive read some papers are just to similar to another, or its just speculation type of study/research.
I think we also need to be careful about what we consider low-quality clones of other work.
Reproduction of research is extremely important. It isn’t glamorous, but it’s how we verify shit.
Yes—academic publishing has become a quantity engine—endlessly churning out papers that echo one another—more about survival than discovery. Many PhDs write for the CV, not the cosmos—speculating, recycling, or rephrasing ideas to stay afloat in the “publish or perish” tide—where innovation drowns quietly beneath the noise. /gpt
Imagine how much worse it’s going to get as more and more is ai slop like the above.
As someone outside of academia, seeing the phrase only 34 papers feels like being shot in the face
Honestly if I see someone who publishes like 200+ papers I would just be wondering… What the hell did they contribute? They’re churning shit out the door so either they weren’t involved much and did the bare minimum to put their name on the paper or it was mostly inconsequential and non-impressive shit that you could churn out in a few weeks.
There’s a guy at IBM who has thousands of patents with his name on.
He works in the department that helps people write patent applications.
It really depends on the field. I will talk about fields I know: fundamental math - one paper every 2-3 years is a good pace, every paper 50-100 pages. AI - a paper a month is the usual, with a hard cap at 10 pages, often less.
They could also be directing thesis. They’ll appear in their students papers on the topic. My professor was incresibly useful in mine, and I know he does this a lot.
A lot of academia’s problems are just Capitalism’s perversion on display: incentivizing the wrong thing in every case. But it’s also not in such bad shape as the anti-science grifters (e.g. Hossenfelder) like to pretend
I sometimes see videos of Hossenfelder on my feed and have watched a couple. Would you mind adding some context? What are “anti-science grifters”? Sry if i’m a bit out of the loop here.
There’s probably more to it but at minimum she loves to opine on things she has no expertise on and gets things very wrong as a result. Often things that aren’t even science related.
Ah, that makes sense to me. Would you mind giving an example? As i have no expertise at all in the things she is talking about it is a bit difficult to judge the content through this lens.
One I recall that rubbed me the wrong way was one of her videos on “is being trans a social fad?”
One the one side you have people claiming that it’s a socially contagious fad among the brainwashed woke who want to mutilate your innocent children. On the other side there are those saying that it’s saving the lives of minorities who’ve been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people, like you and I, who think both sides are crazy and could someone please summarise the facts in simple words, which is what I’m here for.
Not super fond of the “both sides are crazy” idea when one side is arguing “people should have equal access to medical care and be left to live in peace” and the other is trying to legislate the former people out of existence.
She further goes on to platform ideas like “rapid onset gender dysphoria” which is based on spurious data gathered on a “parents of trans children” forum. None of the actual studies on the subject have supported the idea at all. The science is against it, yet she’s presenting it like it’s some “other side of the coin” nuanced take, and not just utter nonsense. It’s a bit like lending credence to the idea that the Earth is flat because there’s a whole group of flat-earthers out there who believe it is.
Ultimately though, I think my main reason for avoiding her is that she just doesn’t post sources. They’re all hidden on her Patreon, and I just don’t think that’s how it should work. I know educational videos aren’t exactly scientific papers, but hiding your sources just strikes me as bad manners. If the goal is to educate and nurture an interest in a subject, why obscure the path you took to get it? It just doesn’t make sense to me, and most other channels like hers do publish their sources.
Professor Dave has a lot of examples he’s pulled from her videos as well as counter arguments.
Awesome, thank you.
Angela Collier on YT has some good videos about these. I think those videos talks about conspiracy and science crackpots.
Would that I had more than one upvote for Angela Collier. Her last video actually addresses the Sabine Hossenfelder issue directly. https://youtu.be/miJbW3i9qQc
Okay, i looked into those and i know the type. If i wanted to name a person that embodies this i’d go to people like Graham Hancock.
How dies it apply to Hossenfelder?
Adding to what the others have said: I think Hossenfelder is also an example of chasing YouTube popularity. And apparently many people are really into this anti-science, right-wing stuff. It probably also aligns somehow with her own values, but I’m pretty confident that this is beneficial to her streaming business.
Edit: She’s a right wing grifter who has been out of science for a while and is clearly very annoyed about it, because she came up with bad ideas and doesn’t really know anything about most of the things she talks about.
Sure, not a bad view and I don’t know much about Brunkow and how she works, to be clear… but: you do need all these things in order to get academic funding so you can work on your ideas. Which I am not saying is a great system, it isn’t, but I don’t think it is easy to say these days to academic reseachers, especially early career ones, to not care too much about publications.
Edit: it is also the fallacy of saying, look she made it like that, so you can too! While she is likely a massive exception to the rule.
I find that people high up in academics tend to lose touch with reality.
I remember in college one professor ranting and raving about how students worry about grades too much and that we should all focus on actually retaining the material.
It’s like yeah that’s a pretty thought but 70% of the class was there on scholarship so if we don’t make the grade we don’t finish and have a mountain of debt.
On a separate occasion the dean of engineering wasted 2 full lectures of ethics class ranting about how we should give to the alumni association and how “it’s a privilege to be here so we need to pay it back.”
There were over 100 people in that room who were in at least $60k of debt to the school and we still had another semester left before graduation.
These people have brains the size of planets but couldn’t comprehend in the slightest how reality gets in the way of their pretty little egalitarian ideals.
and also probably not aware of the JOB market for the students, they are out of touch because they got thiers 20-30+years ago with no competition, or dont have to deal with things like INDEED or screening software. they often give bad advice as advisors(which is forced by college to become advisors), which seems to be common in most universities, just to get you out of the room quicker, so they have to deal with you anymore. also they become super weird if you try to press them on wet-lab work experience or internships.
Most people who stay in academia do so because they couldn’t hack it in the real world.
That’s why they get so squirrelly when you ask about work experience, they either don’t have any or they blew it super hard and had to return to the academia bubble.
*But also do it in your free time after your real job and do it for free
It really is amazing any non-corporate research ever gets this far.
Science ranking is one more bullshit to deal nowadays. Like if the discovery of something new in a fiels ia going to care about how many medals you have hanging from your suit.
This is literally the bullshit that science magazines and publication entities love the most.
I had colleagues going to someones courses or presentation just because that persom had high publications score, no care about if it’s even interesting what that person did.
Are we trying to choke science with publications? Any dumbass can publish tons of stuff like a news reporter, does it matter? Apparently yes. Should it matter? No.
Don’t worry, that system is currently being completely fucked by AI as well.
If quantity is the measure instead of quality: AI wins!
Repurposed joke: It’s able to make more mistakes faster than any other invention… with the possible exception of tequila and handguns.
And, before the prize fame, was she able to afford a comfortable home and a family without clout chasing?
I mean sure, as long as I don’t care about getting tenure or finding a permanent position…
The idea is that if you focus on the work, all of that would/should follow…
I have read a few anecdotes from scholars basically confirming this: they were doing “everything right” and getting nowhere but the moment they decided to just do the work that makes them happy, all the titles and positions followed.
I believe Patricia Ryan Madson is one such story although not in a scientific branch. IIRC, she could not get permanent positions in any university even though she had a “perfect resume” but then decided to follow her passion and her career just took off.
I know this is idealistic, but I still wish this were how the world works
I sure hope this is how it works, because I haven’t been blessed with the patience to care about any of that. I want to solve mysteries.
Talking from the standpoint of “I recently got a position and won quite some grants considering my age”: you really have to balance the two. Going out and doing the research you want to will make you do good research and make you appealing to fellow researchers, but you also need a bit of a catchy title from time to time and a lot of networking, everywhere, all the time. That often includes planning your own symposium/workshop/whatever. Then getting a small grant always helps, and that is a “skill” on its own: selling your research to people that don’t know anything about it while feeling like you are completely waisting your time.
So you’re saying all I have to do in order to be a successful scientist is solve mysteries and talk about science? Easy peasy!
If you want to talk more, feel free to dm me
same… I couldn’t care less about titles or office politics… I just want some challenging work to do and a path to work-life balance
I have a high school friend who owns a paper mill. He was a rich kid who never did the work, and always took credit for others work.
He has an h-index of 90 and 200,000 citations. He is not a professor.
A paper mill will produce a lot of papers.
I am not following…how does he have so many papers with a high number of citations if he is not a professor? Just an extremely prolific postdoc/person on soft money?
He owns a paper mill, he games the system
There’s rankings for scientists?
yea, if you see how hard is it to get a faculty position you will see. while i was in college, i was in a TALK where the presentor said the phd that was coming to present his research was writing DOZENS of papers just to get noticed by a university for hiring. and people have been complaining how some of these papers are often low quality. its quantity of quality.
There absolutely is. Academia is completely fucked.
They should just join the unranked servers
Can’t argue with that
Like in shit restaurants?
yeah, not like Wall Street, government or industry.
Shut up, #16,793.
Yes, and if you fall down far enough you won’t get any grants to do any research, and “forced” to go back to teaching/mentoring. Both of those things tell a lot about the state of high-level education and academia in the west.
The analytics are overblown, and coaches need to get back to the big picture. Stanford traded Hollins at the deadline for Wu, but picked up the player option on Candell for the 4th year. The performance bonus if they make the all-star team should provide enough motivation to ensure they don’t get saddled with a mid-career ball hog. Team chemistry will be key, hopefully during the preseason they can get it together and not have any niggling injuries interrupt. There is concern about the defensive strategy on set plays, their specialist Franco just had their contract waived and stretched under the current contract, so the team may look to the transfer market mid season when it opens, or potentially to move up in the spring draft to fill needs. Still can’t believe they traded Simpson and pay 2.7 per year for Johnson.
Universities run by MBAs and academics operating like sports franchises.Meanwhile, they’re arresting students in campus for protesting genocide and fascism.
Seems legit.
I can win a Nobel prize too is what i gain from this?
Not with no I caps.
Would the Nobel prize committee be as petty as you?
Like seriously, you solve a global illness and because you don’t capitalise your i’s then they’ll be like nah fam.
I expect someone calling themselves “GrammarPolice” to capitalise I’s. Yes.
Thank you. Don’t call yourself a cop just cuz you stole his hat and used it to try grabbing the gold he was supposed to guard.
Quality over quantity.
