Everyday Scientist

end grant writing; award prizes for papers instead

My proposal for funding academic research science: instead of funding grants, just award financial prizes for good papers.

Implementation

Award half the prize upon publication (or preprint); award the second half upon an independent replication of the results, 25% to the original authors and 25% to the replicators. (If a good-faith replication attempt fails, the replicators would still receive their portion, but the original authors would not receive their replication bonus. The measure for the quality of the replication would be whether the work could be published in a reputable journal.)

Prize winning papers would be chosen by rotating committees of professors following a rubric announced prior to the prize committee meeting (replacing grant study sections). Different committees could be assembled for different research topics, with appropriately tailored rubrics. Any paper published in the prior 12 months would be eligible during each prize committee meeting (there could be multiple committees convened each year, giving any given paper multiple chances at winning). Some committees would be assembled to identify “sleeper” papers: works that are up to 5 years old that had been overlooked by previous committees but have proven to be especially valuable.

The prize amount could vary by field or even by paper. A typical R01 grant is $150k+ annually for 5 years. So prizes could vary from $200k up to $1M+ for a major tour-de-force paper with substantial impact. The goal would be to distribute the same pot of money to approximately the same number of labs in roughly the same proportion, but with a much smaller bureaucratic burden and with better incentives for reproducibility.

There would probably need to be some cap on the total prize money an individual PI could receive at any one time. If they are over the cap, then either their papers would simply not be eligible for a prize that round or their prize money would flow to the collaborators on that paper or department.

Prize money would still go to the PI and lab via the university, not as a blank check to an individual professor. Indirects/overhead would still be applied. The goal would be to have approximately the same amount of money flowing to the university and the labs, but with a less onerous process.

Advantages

The prize approach accomplishes the following:

• Rewards actual outputs rather than promises.
• Creates strong incentives for reproducible work.
• Incentivizes impactful, innovative results that are convincing and accepted by the scientific community.
• Frees up professors’ time to focus on paper writing and mentoring instead of grant writing.
• Reduces the workload for university grant offices, which currently spend considerable time reviewing and approving proposals before submission, thereby reducing costs and freeing administrative staff at universities and funding agencies to focus on other support functions.
• Removes back-and-forth about budgets, justifications, biosketches, data-sharing policies, etc.
• Does away with byzantine formatting requirements.
• Obviates¹ the need for progress reports and renewals throughout the grant period.

Professors spend a huge amount of time writing grants, and university grant offices dedicate substantial resources helping researchers navigate complex formatting and compliance requirements, including page lengths, fonts, hyperlinks, sections, etc. Academic researchers currently focus on publishing their work, so grants should reinforce that drive, not distract PIs with hundreds of hours of grant writing. Prize committees would replace grant review panels (roughly equivalent work), while reducing the administrative burden on both university grant offices and granting agencies.

The current grant funding structure purports to be forward-looking, providing funding for good ideas to be implemented. But actual grants require not only a good track record for the PI, but also a large amount of preliminary data. So, in effect, grants fund a lot of work that’s already been completed, and the awarded money usually gets spent on lab work outside the scope of the original proposal. So, while appearing to be prospective, grants are often retrospective in practice. Granting prizes for good papers simply makes official how funding already flows in reality.

How to fund research before winning prizes

The central challenge would be providing runway funding, especially for early-career researchers who have no eligible papers yet. With fewer resources needed for proposal preparation support, some overhead funds could be redirected to departmental slush funds. Departments could then provide startup packages, bridge funding between prizes, or support for labs that demonstrate progress toward publishable work.

This would shift evaluation of proposed research from granting agencies to local departments, where a lab’s potential is more knowable. However, departments are often rife with unhealthy politics and lack sufficient guardrails against favoritism and bias. Whether departmental evaluation would be less burdensome than current grants – and whether freed-up overhead would provide sufficient funding – remains an open question.

Alternatively, granting agencies could dedicate some funds for prizes awarded specifically to a professor’s first paper, or maintain a smaller pot of traditional proposal-style funding for early-career researchers. But as it stands, professors who don’t publish within their first few years are unlikely to receive traditional grants or be awarded tenure anyway, so the prize approach doesn’t necessarily create more pressure than the current system.

Downsides

Not every good paper would win a prize. Yes, of course there would still be disappointing results: inevitably, some deserving papers would fail to attract money because the subject matter is out of fashion or reviewer bias or a host of other unfair reasons. But with a limited amount of money and an effectively unlimited number of professors, it’s impossible to fund everyone, so someone will always be neglected. Winning a prize would be no more unpredictable than receiving a good score on a grant. My proposal is no less fair than the whims of the current granting process.

Incentivizes short-term work. Scientists would be less motivated to tackle a longer-term project, even if it is promising. The department or other funding agency would need to step in to float the project for years until it comes to fruition. And if whoever funds that float requires proposals to have the same level of detail and complexity as current grant proposals, we’d be back to square one. But proposals for future work need not be as onerous as current NIH regulations, especially if funded by the department or by private organizations like HHMI. Another source of funding for longer-term projects may actually come from paper prizes: professors who have won multiple prizes in the recent past would have ample money to fund collaborations and longer projects.

Disincentivizes high-risk research. Researchers might be wary of taking on high-risk/high-reward projects, because, if the experiments fail, they couldn’t expect a prize. That said, if such a project succeeds, then the prize money would likely be larger. Such is the nature of high-risk/high-reward. Therefore, the prize money for impactful work would need to be sufficiently large to encourage at least a portion of researchers to take on projects that are higher risk. Furthermore, if researchers are able to publish details of a failed “moonshot” that advanced the field despite not succeeding, such a paper would be eligible for a prize. The flexibility of prize funding might actually enable more ambitious research, since successful researchers would have discretion over how to deploy their winnings without the constraints of grant-specified aims.

Disincentivizes collaborations. Collaborators would likely negotiate some cut of a potential prize ahead of time, or there would be a standard formula (e.g. 75% to the last author and the remainder of the prize to the other PI collaborators on the paper). Maybe PIs would be less willing to add collaborators to a project, for fear that they may need to share some of the prize money with other PIs. Maybe there could be a bonus to help support collaborators.

Expensive projects. This would not work for huge projects like clinical trials or massive particle physics consortiums, which would need ample funding before the experiments or construction actually begin. But those could continue to be funded in the current fashion.

What will professors do with their freed up time? Part of the job of a professor is to write grants. If they suddenly don’t need to write grants, will they actually spend more time teaching and mentoring, or will they just work less? Not sure. That’s a valid point.

Moving forward

The next step would be to run a pilot. Initially, 20% of NIH and NSF funding could be converted to this model in select fields that would be amenable, then evaluated after 5 years. At that time, the percentage of funding provided via the prize mechanism might be increased or decreased based on the outcome of the pilot. It’s unlikely that granting agencies would ever completely eliminate the traditional grant proposal, but the health of academic science could be strengthened if even a minority of the funding rewarded impactful, reproducible papers.

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1. Thesaurus, don’t fail me now. ↩︎

Replace Peer Review with “Peer Replication”

UPDATE: EMBO Reports article here and a write-up in Nature here.

As I’ve posted before and many others have noted, there is a serious problem with lack of adequate replication in many fields of science. The current peer review process is a dreadful combination of being both very fallible and also a huge hurdle to communicating important science.

Instead of waiting for a few experts in the field to read and apply their stamp of approval to a manuscript, the real test of a paper should be the ability to reproduce its findings in the real world. (As Andy York has pointed out, the best test of a new method is not a peer reviewing your paper, but a peer actually using your technique.) But almost no published papers are subsequently replicated by independent labs, because there is very little incentive for anyone to spend time and resources testing an already published finding. That is precisely the opposite of how science should ideally operate.

Let’s Replace Traditional Peer Review with “Peer Replication”

Instead of sending out a manuscript to anonymous referees to read and review, preprints should be sent to other labs to actually replicate the findings. Once the key findings are replicated, the manuscript would be accepted and published.

(Of course, as many of us do with preprints, authors can solicit comments from colleagues and revise a manuscript based on that feedback. The difference is that editors would neither seek such feedback nor require revisions.)

Along with the original data, the results of the attempted replication would be presented, for example as a table that includes which reagents/techniques were identical. The more parameters that are different between the original experiment and the replication, the more robust the ultimate finding if the referees get similar results.

Incentives

What incentive would any professor have to volunteer their time (or their trainees’ time) to try to reproduce someone else’s experiment? Simple: credit. Traditional peer review requires a lot of time and effort to do well, but with zero reward except a warm fuzzy feeling (if that). For papers published after peer replication, the names of researchers who undertook the replication work will be included in the published paper (on a separate line). Unlike peer review, the referees will actually receive compensation for their work in the form of citations and another paper to include on their CV.

Why would authors be willing to have their precious findings put through the wringer of real-world replication? First and foremost, because most scientists value finding truth, and would love to show that their findings hold up even after rigorous testing. Secondly, the process should actually be more rewarding than traditional peer review, which puts a huge burden on the authors to perform additional experiments and defend their work against armchair reviewers. Peer replication turns the process on its head: the referees would do the work of defending the manuscript’s findings.

Feasible Experiments

There are serious impediments to actually reproducing a lot of findings that use seriously advanced scientific techniques or require long times or a lot of resources (e.g. mouse work). It will be the job of editors—in collaboration with the authors and referees—to determine the set of experiments that will be undertaken, balancing rigor and feasibility. Of course, this might leave some of the most complex experiments unreplicated, but then it would be up to the readers to decide for themselves how to judge the paper as a whole.

What if all the experiments in the paper are too complicated to replicate? Then you can submit to JOOT.

Ancillary Benefits

Peer replication transforms the adversarial process of peer review into a cooperation among colleagues to seek the truth. Another set of eyes and brains on an experiment could introduce additional controls or alternative experimental approaches that would bolster the original finding.

This approach also encourages sharing experimental procedures among labs in a manner that can foster future collaborations, inspire novel approaches, and train students and postdocs in a wider range of techniques. Too often, valuable hands-on knowledge is sequestered in individual labs; peer replication would offer an avenue to disseminate those skills.

Peer replication would reduce fraud. Often, the other authors on an ultimately retracted paper only later discover that their coworker fabricated data. It would be nearly impossible for a researcher to pass off fabricated data or manipulated images as real if other researchers actually attempt to reproduce the experimental results. 

Potential Problems

One serious problem with peer replication is the additional time it may take between submission and ultimate publication. On the other hand, it often takes many months to go through the traditional peer review process, and replicating experiments may not actually add any time in many cases. Still this could be mitigated by authors submitting segments of stories as they go. Instead of waiting until the entire manuscript is polished, authors or editors could start arranging replications while the manuscript is still in preparation. Ideally, there would even be a  journal-blind mechanism (like ReviewCommons) to arrange reproducing these piecewise findings.

Another problem is what to do when the replications fail. There would still need to be a judgement call as to whether the failed replication is essential to the manuscript and/or if the attempt at replication was adequately undertaken. Going a second round at attempting a replication may be warranted, but editors would have to be wary of just repeating until something works and then stopping. Pre-registering the replication plan could help with that. Also, including details of the failed replications in the published paper would be a must.

Finally, there would still be the problem of authors “shopping” their manuscript. If the replications fail and the manuscript is rejected, the authors could simply submit to another journal. I think the rejected papers would need to be archived in some fashion to maintain transparency and accountability. This would also allow some mechanism for the peer replicators to get credit for their efforts.

Summary of Roles:

• Editor:
  • Screen submissions and reject manuscripts with obviously flawed science, experiments not worth replicating, essential controls missing, or seriously boring results.
  • Find appropriate referees.
  • With authors and referees, collaboratively decide which experiments the referees should attempt to replicate and how.
  • Ultimately conclude, in consultation with referees, whether the findings in the papers are sufficiently reproducible to warrant full publication.
• Authors:
  • Write the manuscript, seek feedback (e.g. via bioRxiv), and make revisions before submitting to the journal.
  • Assist referees with experimental design, reagents, and even access to personnel or specialized equipment if necessary.
• Referees:
  • Faithfully attempt to reproduce the experimental results core to the manuscript.
  • Optional: Perform any necessary additional experiments or controls to close any substantial flaws in the work.
  • Collate results.
• Readers:
  • Read the published paper and decide for themselves if the evidence supports the claims, with the confidence that the key experiments have been independently replicated by another lab.
  • Cite reproducible science.

How to Get Started

While it would be great if a journal like eLife simply piloted a peer replication pathway, I don’t think we can wait for Big Publication to initiate the shift away from traditional peer review. Maybe the quickest route would be for an organization like Review Commons to organize a trial of this new approach. They could identify some good candidates from bioRxiv and, with the authors, recruit referees to undertake the replications. Then the entire package could be shopped to journals.

I suspect that once scientists see peer replication in print, it will be hard to take seriously papers vetted only by peer review. Better science will outcompete unreproduced findings.

(Thanks Arthur Charles-Orszag for the fruitful discussions!)

2014 nobel predictions

Time for 2014 Nobel Prize predictions. Actually, it’s a little early, but with Lasker Prize announcements, I just couldn’t wait. Here’s my track record:

• 2008: I said that it was obvious that Roger Tsien would win.
• 2009: I didn’t make a prediction
• 2010: I included Suzuki and Heck in my predictions.
• 2011: I failed miserably.
• 2012: I included Kobilka and GPCRs among my six predictions.
• 2013: I (and everyone else) correctly predicted that Higgs would win.

So here are my 2014 predictions:

Chemistry: Nanotechnology: Alivisatos, Whitesides, Lieber

Medicine: DNA/blotting: Southern, Jefferys, Burnette

Physics: Cloaking/nonlinear optics: Pendry, Harris

Peace: Ebola: Médecins Sans Frontières

Other and past predictions:

Biomolecular motors: Vale, Sheetz, Spudich, Brady

Unfolded protein response: Walter, Mori

Soft lithography and microfluidics: Whitesides, Quake

Chaperonins: Horwich, Hartl, Lindquist, Ellis

Polymers: Frechet, Matyjaszewski, Wang, Willson

Electrochemistry/bioinorganic: Bard, Gray, Lippard

Single-molecule spectroscopy: Moerner [awarded in 2014], Orrit

Solar: Grätzel, Nocera

DNA synthesis: Caruthers

Next-gen sequencing: Webb, Craighead, Klenerman, Church …

Super-resolution optical microscopy: Betzig [awarded in 2014], Hell [awarded in 2014], Zhuang, Hess

NMR and membranes: McConnell

Electron Transfer in DNA/Electrochemical DNA Damage Sensors: Barton, Giese, Schuster

Pd-catalyzed Alkyne/Alkene Coupling and Atom-Economy: Trost

Nuclear hormone receptors: Chambon, Evans, Jensen, O’Malley

Two-photon microscopy: Webb, Denk, Strickler

DNA microarrays: Brown

AIDS: Hütter

The Pill: Djerassi

T-cell receptor: Allison [awarded in 2018], Reinherz, Kappler, Marrack

Suggestions from others:

Quantum dots: Brus

Lithium-ion batteries: Goodenough, Whittingham, Yoshino

CRISPR: Doudna

Optogenetics: Deisseroth, Zemelman, Miesenböck, Isacoff

Other predictions:

Thompson

Chemistry World

Curious Wavefunction

In the Pipeline

Inside Science

Cocktail Party Physics

Dayside

block?

Sidewalk infographic fail.

You think Stanford would know how to spell Felix Bloch’s name.

great chemophobia article in Slate

I’ve argued in the past that the Precautionary Principle is logically flawed, even dangerous. A recent article on Slate gives a great job giving an example of when the Precautionary Principle goes bad. In response to a NYT article on alternative medicine, the Slate article compares the FDA-approved drugs to the alternative medicine that a mother is more comfortable giving her son. (Surprise! the alternative medicine also contains chemicals.)

The reality is this. [The NYT author] has been tricked by the language, maliciously or not, into considering switching her child from a carefully measured weekly dose of this molecule:

To four doses a day of an unknown amount of this chemical:

Really?

I want to be absolutely clear. Neither of these chemicals is benign or nontoxic. The LD-50 (the “lethal dose” amount that kills 50 percent of mice fed the chemical) is about the same for quercetin as it is for methotrexate, roughly 150 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.

…

Berberine, one of the drugs found in four-marvels powder, has been documented to cause brain damage in infants. Hello? Exactly how much of this have you been giving your son?

…

[The NYT author’s] “better the molecule I don’t know, than the molecule I do” stance may help her sleep better, but it is ignorance nonetheless. The chemicals are still there, even when you squint your eyes closed so you can’t see them.

This is really scary to me, that parents are giving their children unknown doses of potentially dangerous drugs. This is exactly the danger of the Precautionary Principle: people seem more comfortable with unknown dangers than known and carefully quantified risks. That’s a silly approach to risk, but I think it might just be how our brains work. And knowing that, we should be careful to guard against it.

Another concern not mentioned in either the Slate or NYT article is the drug interactions when taking a prescribed medicine with unknown alternative drugs: because they aren’t tested, alternative medicines have the potential for devastating interactions. The FDA should require at least safety testing (if not efficacy) of all medicines, both modern-medicine and alternative. NIH has an alternative medicines institute, but I wonder how quickly they can test all the options out there.

I want to also add that I completely understand the NYT mother’s concern about giving her son drugs every day. And I completely agree with the mom’s effort to find diet changes that help: the body is a complicated network, and diet can have a huge effect on health. And the immune system is in some senses a black box that we’re only beginning to understand. A variety of alternative treatments and diet changes should be tried, but eating a bunch of unknown chemicals because they have prettier names is really concerning.

I really feel for the boy and his mom, and I wish there was a magic wand to take away his pain. But even if there were, we should probably ask about the side effects of the wand.

slate

Paul and I were interviewed for a Slate.com article about Nobel Prize predictions. More details back at my original post on the 2012 Prize.

the precautionary principle is flawed

I’ve always warned against the Precautionary Principle, mainly because it has a fatal flaw: no one applies the same principle to the alternatives. The Precautionary Principle assumes a product (or medicine or technology) is harmful until it is proven to be safe, instead of the other way around. This sounds nice, but the problem is that it doesn’t take into account the dangers of the alternative products (or medicines or technologies). That is, at least how most consumers apply the principle.

I warned against this when the BPA kerfuffle emerged. Many people started to get concerned about bisphenol A, which is a monomer for polycarbonate used in many plastic bottles. Some BPA can leach from the plastic into food or liquids, and there has been some evidence that it may mimic hormones in the human body and may have negative health effects especially in children. So everyone started banning BPA bottles and switching to other materials. The main alternative is “BPA-free” plastics. When this happened, I asked, “But what are those plastics made of??”

Basically, everyone switched over from a known product (polycarbonate) that might have some deleterious effects, to a proprietary polymer (Eastman’s Tritan) that we knew nothing about. And everyone felt safe.

But what if Tritan is a thousand times more dangerous? What if the glass bottles that some people switched to leaches lead (although I doubt many parents are giving their kids crystal to drink out of)? What if those steel water bottles put chromium into your water? (The aluminum ones like Sigg are coated with a plastic, anyway.) It doesn’t really make tons of sense to throw away your old water bottles to buy brand new ones that have a new, proprietary plastic that can leach new, unknown chemicals into your water.

C&E News has a story about Eastman’s Tritan and it’s possible health dangers. We should all throw away our new water bottles and start drinking out of another unknown material so another company can make billions off of our fears. Or just start drinking directly from the faucet.

The only correct application of the Precautionary Principle is to have someone measure the safety of all the materials used to make water bottles and baby sippy cups and weigh the dangers against each other. Maybe Eastman should pay for that. ;)

(That said, I must admit that I drink out of glass, a coffee mug made in China, and a steel water bottle. Who knows what I have in my body.)

Thanks for the tip, Chemjobber.

Atoms and Molecules – A Child’s Guide to Chemistry

My labmate wrote a chemistry book for children … and his daughter did the illustrations. It succinctly describes atoms, orbitals, bonding, molecules, and biomolecules.

I highly recommend it.

PeerJ

This is an interesting idea. PeerJ sounds like it’s going to be an open access journal, with a cheap publication fee ($99 for a lifetime membership). I wonder if it will be selective?

I’m more excited about HHMI’s new journal eLife.

chemicals ad campaign

Paul has a good first draft of a chemicals ad campaign. But I was more inspired by Klaas Wynne‘s “We love … eat … live chemicals” poster:

The reason I like it is that it points out that “chemical-free” is a stupid label, and that not all chemicals are bad (at the right doses). This type of poster could be also applied to “chemical-free” shampoos, by listing what’s in natural coconut and mint oils. I also think it would be cool to draw all those chemicals (make the size of the structure correspond to the relative amount in the apple), and repeat for several “natural” and man-made products.

I think that the “We love chemicals” posters could be combined with a set of “Natural isn’t aways safe” posters. For instance, Andrea writes about an example of dangerous natural foodstuffs. And there’s always Jim Collman’s book Naturally Dangerous.

Here are my quick drafts:

I’m moderately satisfied with them.

UPDATE: MRW posted his really cool posters:

Very cool. I like them, MRW!

405 nm laser fun

I bought a 10 mW (30 mW, actually, according to our lab’s power meter) 405 nm laser from Amazon. No this pointer isn’t for presentations, for reasons I have already stated. This pointer is for fun.

For instance, I’ve enjoyed shooting the beam through tonic water and seeing the fluorescence from quinine. Here’s some total internal reflection:

Any other ideas for cool “experiments”?

(Note, please be careful with this or any laser pointer. Although the purple light emanating from this pointer doesn’t look bright, it can damage your eye or skin. Even if your eyes aren’t sensitive to 405 nm, that doesn’t mean they can’t be damaged by 405 nm. This pointer is dangerous to be viewed even in diffuse reflections.)

(P.S. The sorta shitty photo credited to E.Y.L.)

UPDATE: It turns out that urine is also fluorescent:

Especially after taking a multivitamin.

chemistry should not focus on the origin of life

Several chemists (e.g. here and here) have recently suggested that the origin of life (OOL) should be the next big question the field of chemistry could tackle.

Here’s why I disagree:

• OOL research is not (directly) practical. Studying OOL won’t directly result in new technologies, products, or cures that the public can use. I prefer the Deutch and Whitesides approach. There are more pressing challenges that chemists can contribute to solving (cancer, disease, chemistry of biology, global warming, alternative energy sources, etc.). OOL comes across as an intellectual pursuit for armchair chemists.
• OOL is politically, emotionally, and religiously charged. The last thing we need is idiots trying to cut chemistry funding because their faith says something different than the science. Studying OOL is the perfect way to offend a bunch of folks and make the field of chemistry a target of religious nuts. I don’t think we should guide our research on what religious nuts want, but why kick the beehive?
• OOL is basically unanswerable. We might be able to test theories of the OOL, but we won’t be able to observe the true origins of life on this planet. Until we invent a time machine. That makes OOL research speculative and uninteresting to me. And even if we could find out, who really cares? Will that change our day-to-day life? OOL seems like more of a religious question than one of science.

Of course, some chemists should work on OOL. Just like some physicists should work on counting the number of alternate universes. But I don’t think chemistry as a whole should devote a major portion of its efforts to the “big questions” like OOL and what the universe was before the Big Bang. Chemistry is a practical science that answers questions about our everyday life. Let’s harness that power instead of trying to be as “cool” and big-question oriented as physics.

There. I hope I offended everyone who works on OOL. :)

P.S. Harry Gray and Jay Labringer have a recent editorial in Science stating that the Big Questions in chemistry are harder to see. They suggest understanding photosynthesis as one of those Questions.

why gold?

So why is gold valuable? NPR’s Planet Money has a fun podcast exploring the chemical reasons that humans value gold as a currency. Prof. Sanat Kumar goes through all the elements on the periodic table, and explains the reasons that each element couldn’t be a currency. For instance, lithium can be explosive when exposed to air, noble gases are really hard to keep in your pocket, silicon is too abundant, etc.

The podcast concludes that it was inevitable that humans would choose gold as currency. Cute.

ucsf vs tsa

Some profs at UCSF have concerns about the radiation dose of backscatter scanners, specifically that all the energy is deposited in the skin instead of being spread throughout the entire body. So the dose is concentrated in time and volume. Basically, it sounds like TSA hasn’t done enough safety testing on these machines.

I would like to see a risk analysis of the probability of the screening causing cancer vs. the reduced threat of airline passengers dying from terrorism. The problem is that all these are very low probability events.

Anyway, this is my response to the entire fiasco: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRpWnK6Rg3E

(via Austin)

caveat grumptor

Royce Murray doesn’t like blogs.

No that’s an oversimplification of his editorial. Actually, his worry is that science blogs are more fun and easier to read than real science journalism (which, by the way, is hard to find); meanwhile, bloggers have no required credentials, no accountability, and might just be lying to everyone.

Damn straight.

UPDATE: In case it isn’t clear, Royce Murray is one of my favorite chemists and teachers. UNC is my Alma Mater, and I really appreciated his class. While most bloggers are pretty unhappy with Royce’s editorial, I wasn’t offended. I basically agree that neither the public nor scientists should be getting information from blogs without a grain of salt. Especially this blog. I’m sarcastic 83% of the time.