I spent the past academic year writing up the results of my dissertation, which proved quite a task. I call it a task because it was the first time that I had all my data together and could think of my dissertation as one body of work that needed to be communicated in a comprehensible manner. With all the data collected and processed, the end of graduate school seemed near yet so far since I still had to make sense of all the little pieces of the puzzle (data!) and more so make the case to the dissertation committee members that the work done is sufficient to be awarded a doctoral degree.

As if this is not enough, while writing I had to think beyond the PhD process (as all candidates do). I found this period quite stressful since I had to halt my dissertation work at different points and think about viable future projects, which ultimately became postdoctoral applications. It was also stressful because at the time the future appeared very uncertain; I kept wondering would I remain in the DC area? Will I have to pack and move? Is my project convincing enough to be awarded a postdoctoral fellowship? What next?

I think what helped in my experience was taking a day or two in a week and using that time to think and work on possible future projects. In addition, brainstorming with lab members and faculty members really helped. Most had refreshing advice on how to improve my ideas. At the end of it, I came out of the dissertation writing process more resilient, more experienced, with an exciting future project, and with a more positive experience of graduate school.

“The first year graduate student in my lab thinks his Nobel Prize is coming next week.”

“She has had a tremendously successful graduate career, successfully maneuvering her way from failure to failure.”

Wise senior scientists recently made these statements to me, and I bet that most people with scientific training will get a laugh out of both quotations. The first statement suggests that some people, even those just embarking on a career in science, think that science is easy – that one good experiment stands between you and the highest echelons of achievement. While there is nothing wrong with youthful optimism, an expectation this high is guaranteed to fail!

A recent blog I stumbled upon notes that the scientific process is typically, and incorrectly, taught as a linear process: state a problem, formulate a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, analyze data, and draw conclusions. As a result, the expectation of many young scientists is that once they begin their own projects they will proceed in this orderly trajectory. And when things don’t play out so smoothly? This linear model of scientific research ignores some of the most important aspects of scientific success: continual monitoring, reassessment, and readjustment. While we plan ahead and try to foresee problems, our science doesn’t always cooperate and the road through the scientific process can take many, many detours.

The second statement highlights what we know as scientists: problems that we face in our research are inevitable. Each of these roadblocks may seem like a bit of a failure, but they are necessary steps in the process. It is not these ‘failures’ that are important, but rather how successfully we recover and adapt. Unforeseen problems must be anticipated, and a scientist’s skills will allow these obstacles to be overcome and the research to continue. Adaptability and perseverance are the bread and butter of the scientist’s toolkit.

This topic has been on my mind because of my own recent trials on the research front. An aspect of my work hadn’t turned out as I had planned, and I was left humbled. As a good portion of a graduate student’s life is consumed by his or her own research, it’s natural to take these hiccups in one’s own research as personal failures. Take a deep breath.  More difficult problems have been conquered before!  While I have learned many things while in graduate school, the ability to recognize problems, adapt, and forge ahead have been among the most difficult lessons. Likely, these will also be the most enduring.

Andrew Du
Hominid PaleobiologyDoctoral Program
Monday, June 10th, 2013, 3 pm
Room 202, HAH 2110 G Street NW

In the old days one of the “perks” of being medically-qualified in the UK was that if you or your family were sick, colleagues would bend-over-backwards to make sure you or your family were seen as soon as possible. They would see you in their office “out-of-hours,” or they would add you to the end of a busy clinic.

My old boss, a consummately skilled surgeon, would never do that. He insisted that colleagues be given a proper slot in his next National Health clinic, or he would see to it that they had an early appointment in his rooms in Harley Street (but he did not bill them for his time). His reasons were the following. When people are seen “out-of-the-system” they do not get processed using the routines that have been established over many years. Some of these routines seem tiresome, but they are there to make sure mistakes are not made. Consultations that are rushed and preemptory are never quite as thorough as those carried out as part of a well-honed routine, and my boss wanted his colleagues and their families to have his proper consideration and the best level of care.

What, you are probably thinking, has all this to do with peer-review? I would argue that taking a careful history and conducting a thorough physical examination are much like carrying out a proper peer-review¹. Neither activity can be rushed or modified, subjected to deadlines, or be overly influenced by forceful personalities, without running the risk that quality will be compromised.

If you are an author of scholarly work, the peer-review system, when operated properly by a wise and experienced editor who uses similarly wise and knowledgeable reviewers, is much more of a boon than a bane. It gives you the chance to have your work and writing exposed to scholars who know your field at least as well as you think you do, and, with luck, they may be more knowledgeable and experienced than you are. They are able to stand back and gently suggest that your methods may not be as flawless as you think, or your interpretations may not be the only ones that should be considered.

This scenario used to be a familiar one when I was a young researcher. People like Bill Pollitzer at the AJPA would find experienced reviewers who gave generously of their time to write comments and suggest changes that improved your work.  But the success of the system was that it was “operated properly by a wise and experienced editor who uses equally wise and knowledgeable reviewers,” and that it was applied to all-comers, without fear or favor.

In those days editors were almost always senior researchers who did not take kindly to being bullied by colleagues who thought they were so elevated, or the material they were presenting was so important, that they had outgrown the peer-review system. Manuscripts came in one at a time, not in packages with a prominent metaphorical label on the bundle saying, in effect, “take it or leave it.” The implication is that if the editor of the journal will not cut the researchers a favorable deal (i.e., protection from pesky knowledgeable reviewers) they will take their business down the road to the competition.

Effective peer-review is easy enough to skirt around. One way is to submit a much longer list of researchers to whom a manuscript should not be sent for review, than to whom it might be sent. This means that unless these conditions are resisted, the hapless editor has to scrabble around in the intellectual undergrowth to find someone not on the “black list” who has enough familiarity with the material to offer any sort of opinion, let alone an informed one. Another way to avoid effective peer review is to ignore the recommendations of knowledgeable reviewers by huffing and puffing at the editor along the lines of “these people don’t know what they are talking about”. It is the academic equivalent of a bank that is “too big to fail”. The logic goes like this. We have been working so long and so diligently on these fossils that no one can possibly know them as intimately as we do, ergo no one else is qualified to gainsay our interpretations. This strategy is less likely to succeed with the editors of specialist journals, but evidently it can be effective if the editor is not familiar with the field.

Of course, one wishes all this was just a bad dream, but many of you will recognize that it reflects some recent, and some not quite so recent, reality. In the latter case the problems associated with finding experienced “un-black listed” reviewers were compounded by the journal in question using its editorial pages, reporters, and publicity machine to give the impression that it was promoting and endorsing the interpretations of the authors of the papers. On that occasion the boundaries between science and journalism were crossed to the detriment of all concerned.

Good, experienced and courageous editors and knowledgeable and impartial reviewers are the bulwarks of the peer-review system. Without the former you do not get the latter and the latter need the support of the former. But, as we have seen recently, without either or both of these essential components peer-review is not effective. As usual, my old surgical boss was right. You circumvent or weaken the checks and balances in any system at your peril.

¹http://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309059437/gifmid/9.gif

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167779902019856

Acknowledgements

Several friends and colleagues have given me advice, much of which I heeded. Normally I would be pleased to name and thank them, but given the circumstances (and in an effort to protect the innocent) their names have been withheld.

CASHP students Serena Bianchi and Brian Schilder at Friendship primary Blow Pierce Junior Academy for Neuroscience Week.

Whatever your profession, you may have felt at some point that you were running on automatic pilot. Caught between deadlines and meetings, you run faster and faster in the hope of beating that to-do list that keeps re-writing itself everyday. I often think that, compared to other professions, scientists are lucky in that they can escape monotony through the intellectual challenges strewn in their path. After hours locked up in a lab for weeks on end, however, science can also be socially alienating, and it is easy to lose the big picture. But it does not have to be that way.

Last week I participated in the Neuroscience Experience Week, a public event with the goal of bringing (neuro)science to middle schoolers. This year, participating institutions included Georgetown University, Catholic University, NIDA, NICHD, NIMH, the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and us, The George Washington University. The event was held at the Friendship primary Blow Pierce Junior Academy, a charter school located in Northeast Washington D.C. For a week, the school graciously hosted and welcomed groups of 6^th-8^th graders coming from all over D.C. to be entertained by the tricks of neuroscientists. Overall, an impressive tally of about 500 kids.

Each day, neuroscientists would show the kids bits and bops of their world: plastic brain models, brains in jars, clips, microscopes, and a lot of enthusiasm. Our lab too had a stand with pictures of brains of different animals, gorilla brain sections, chimpanzee and human brain models, endocasts, several primate skulls, and a couple of real monkey brains that prompted the strongest “ooh…gross” or “ooh…cool” reactions.

My labmates and I had a routine prepared: after welcoming the children, we asked them to match brain pictures to their corresponding animal. We stressed differences in brain size, and shape, and pointed out the animals’ species-specific behavioral specializations. We then drew the kids’ attention to the primate skulls and asked them to gauge how many chimpanzee brains make up a human brain, pointing at the extremely wrinkled surface of the human brain. We ended by showing them replicas of prehistoric tools, such as a chopper and a hand-axe, used by our “less brainy” ancestors.

CASHP postdoc Sarah Barks and student Amy Bauernfeind at the Neuroscience Experience Week.

In the 15 minutes allocated to each group of students, we did our best to convey the lesson that the human brain is about three times larger than the chimpanzee’s, and that it changed over millions of years. The kids appeared generally interested, although they also showed amazement for things we had not anticipated, such as discovering that there is a hole at the base of the skull whereby the brain connects with the spine (the one they could put their fingers in it); or learning, in disbelief, that the long snouted skull on our table belonged to a baboon, not a dinosaur. So, whether or not they’ll remember the details of our lesson, I hope some of these kids left with something even more valuable than scientific facts—the curiosity to know more about who we are and where we come from.

I left with the impression that our work as scientists goes well beyond the laboratory walls, and may inspire in manifold ways: like that teenage girl who asked us, “are you in college?”, and smiling back at our affirmative answer, proclaimed: “I want to go to college”.

My certificate in zombie special effects makeup has come in handier in graduate school than I ever could have imagined.  As my office mates can tell you, I’m easily startled and even the most benign of horror films (i.e., Shaun of the Dead) can keep me awake for three nights.  A semester spent around zombies forced me to “cope with the creepy” and learn to find calm in discomforting situations.

Now, I could spend this blog telling you about how zombies are like cadavers in an anatomy lab.  But those aren’t the discomforting situations to which I’m referring, and cadavers aren’t anything like zombies.  Whereas zombies are fictional (for now…), cadavers are very, very real.  Cadavers are tangible and finite; although there are many parts of their puzzle, if you search hard enough and long enough, you will find all the pieces.  Situations that are truly discomforting are situations that trouble you and stick with you, situations that get inside your head.

Simple engravings are found everywhere in Rouffignac Cave. The ends of these engravings show that they were made by human fingertips pressed against the cave wall. The widths of these engravings also show that many engravings were made by young children, some as young as 2 years old. Image from http://www.history.com/news/prehistoric-children-finger-painted-on-cave-walls.

In that sense, Rouffigac Cave is my prehistoric zombie movie.  My visit to Rouffigac Cave is hands-down the creepiest experience I have ever had.  I was initially blasé about the cave.  Like most kids, I’d grown up seeing pictures of cave art, and I had a vague sense that cave art was special to the cavemen and women who had made it.  If I had been a child in a European elementary school, maybe I would have made a class trip to see the caves at an early age and learned to respect the cave’s immense value to understanding human evolution.  Instead, I had a simplistic vision of Rouffignac.  I imagined strolling along the well-lit, museum-like walls of the cave, snickering at the simplicity of the painting’s finger-paint-like quality or pretentiously commenting on the eternal creativity of the human spirit.

When the lights went out, all of that fell away.  There is nothing on earth darker than a cave.  Even at night, stars and cities offer a little light to guide the way.  But inside a cave, there is nothing but darkness.  I could no longer tell how far away the walls of the cave were, and even the voice of the person right next to me sounded strangely far away.  The walls turned in and out in strange waves, carved by natural forces, and it was not easy to predict whether I should have turned left or right or even if I should have stepped up or down.  If not for the little flashlight at the front of our train car, I would have easily been lost forever merely a hundred yards into the cave.

We traveled slowly into the cave, visiting a few famous pieces of cave art along the way.  Many of the finest examples were cave carvings, not paintings, and I learned that these carvings were not simply the work of chisels against the cave wall.  Prehistoric peoples carefully chose features of the natural cave wall to incorporate into their art, merging the cave itself with their own creative intentions.   A bump on the wall might become a horse’s stern eye, or a ridge might become the proud back of a mammoth.  As we traveled deeper into the cave, I thought every wave of the wall was a new animal, as if a million mammoths were suddenly descending around us.  In some ways, the cave art served only to highlight the mysterious features of the cave that already existed around us, leading us to expect new animals in the darkness and disappointing us when the light revealed nothing but stone.

Paintings and carvings from Altamire Cave show how prehistoric peoples used natural features of the cave walls to help form the shapes of animals. Image from http://donsmaps.com/altamirapaintings.html.

A visit to Rouffignac Cave is strange even in modern times, but for prehistoric peoples this might have been at the boundaries of real and unreal.  We reached the end of the cave by a train built into specially widened tunnels, but prehistoric peoples would have crawled a kilometer on their hands and knees to reach the end of the cave.  The darkness and the cave would have pressed on them from all sides, and paintings and carvings would have been made in this tiny space by lying on the cave floor.  Eventually, prehistoric peoples would have reached the end of the cave and knelt over a large pit that stretches three stories down into the depths of the cave.  This pit is the site of the Grand Ceiling, a famous collection of over one hundred painted and carved animals, that was created by standing on scaffolds set over the pit.  Although the fragile nature of the cave prevented us from climbing down into this pit, we could just make out the cave art that stretched from the pit’s lowest floor all the way back up to the Grand Ceiling where we stood.  One of those pieces of art was a human face, staring back at us.

Rouffignac left me troubled.  There are many questions of human evolution that we can answer by looking at biology.  Cadavers, for instance, can help us understand how nerves generate feeling in our fingertips, how the tongue helps us process food for eating, or how the muscles move the bones of our legs so that we can walk.  But cadavers can’t tell us why we venture into the darkness of caves, not knowing if we will ever find the way back out.  Cavaders can’t tell us why an artist paints an image of animal or a human face, or why people other than the artist might like to look at that image.  Cave art encourages us to consider the parts of human evolution that may be just beyond the reach of our current understanding of human biology and pushes us into the realm of the unknown and the uncomfortable.   Cave art is haunting – and the pun is fully intended.

Michael Day (left) and Bernard Wood (right)

Two weekends ago CASHP hosted a symposium on the ‘Function and Evolution of the Human Foot.’ While the symposium was successful in its own right, it also provided us with the opportunity to meet Dr. Michael Day, the paleoanthropologist who described the OH 8 foot, and incidentally, our own adviser’s PhD supervisor. Talking afterwards, we discovered that we were both equally thrilled to be sitting with an authority on so many seminal finds in paleoanthropology– the Omo Kibish fossils, OH 28, the Laetoli footprints, and of course OH 8. There is a good chance that if you are reading this blog you may have a copy of one of Dr. Day’s books. How many of you have flipped through his Guide to Fossil Man? If you haven’t, your own advisers may have a copy. Because the fossil finds are organized by country and state it will give you a sense of the state of affairs in our field at the time of the last edition in 1986- before some of you were born!

Our own adviser, Bernard Wood, relatively early in his career was the beneficiary of his adviser being in the thick of it all. Bernard tackled the Herculean task of writing the monograph on the Koobi Fora cranial remains and he spoke out on the topic of splitting the species Homo habilis into two taxa. Dr. Day regaled us with his vivid recounting of the day Louis Leakey showed up in John Napier’s office with disarticulated fossil foot bones wrapped in tissue, his early days in Olduvai Gorge, and stories of Mary Leakey, Paul Abell, and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark. At the end of our conversation, we felt more connected to the field through our interactions with a man who has half a decade of personal knowledge about many of the defining moments in paleoanthropology. While these stories were both amazing and entertaining, one of the highlights was hearing stories about our adviser in the early stages of his graduate career.  We asked Dr. Day what Bernard was like as a student, and naturally Dr. Day said nothing incriminating, but rather that Bernard was good at everything he did. Of course he was! As graduate students we often question whether we belong in graduate school or whether we will make important discoveries. Visiting with Dr. Day reminded us why we were drawn to the study paleoanthropology in the first place. When we question our own place and contributions to the field, it helps to know that others have also had their doubts, and that they were reassured by their adviser just as we are by ours.

David B. Patterson
Hominid Paleobiology Doctoral Program
Friday, May 24th, 2013, 9am
Room 202, HAH 2110 G Street NW

The role of extant primate models  for interpreting premolar crown variation in fossil hominins

Dissertation defense by:

Kes Schroer

Hominid Paleobiology Doctoral Program

23rd May 2013

10:00am

Seminar room, 2110 G St., NW