Where's the passion?

Abstract

With this issue of CB&T, we introduce the first in an occasional series of articles on topics that impact our work or shape our professional lives. Our aim is to provide a platform for points of view that are both insightful and thought provoking. Have a perspective you'd like to share or an issue you'd like to discuss? We're open to any relevant topic. Send your 500-word article for Insider's Insight to Kim Mitchell (kmitchell @landesbioscience.com), publications director.

Scientific research was once considered a pinnacle profession where intellectual rigor was paired with a passion for novel discovery. Today, despite better equipment, more funding and online access to a growing reservoir of data, researchers in some of the largest cancer research centers in the country appear to be spending less time in the lab and, perhaps, less time worrying about how their work impacts people with cancer. In his article, Dr. Kern asks whether research is evolving into a predictable career rather than a creative frontier and what that might portend.

It is Sunday afternoon on a sunny, spring day.

I'm walking the halls—all of them—in a modern $59 million building dedicated to cancer research. A half hour ago, I completed a stroll through another, identical building. You see, I'm doing a survey. And the two buildings are largely empty.

Yesterday at noon, I did the same. I walked the halls. Last weekend, three days ago at seven in the evening and three days earlier at nine in the morning and for a number of days last winter, the same. This week, I phone a number of colleagues running successful cancer research labs in other institutions; most, though not all, tell me they had observed similar patterns. These similarities cluster the data and construct tentative patterns for discussion here.

Combined, I observe today 24 persons. They inform me of unobserved others. I re-calibrate my count. Perhaps 36 persons occupy the two buildings for an average of three hours each, for a rough-sum investment today of $470 per person on site during my walk. At night, when the buildings are virtually empty, the calculated perperson investment estimate would approach infinity. Historically, there has never been a more luxuriant time in which to do biologic research. The dirty cold attics of Marie Curie are forgotten.

Depreciating over 30 years, our two buildings represent an investment around $10,800 per day. The on-site overhead (utilities, building maintenance, animal and fixed facilities, security) is another $3,000 per day. The institutional administration of these persons and labs, prorated to these buildings, is $3,000 per day. The total—$16,800 per day. This investment supports the research laboratories, per se, which are individually operated by 725 employees. The laboratory salaries and benefits total another $129,100 per day, excluding the non-research activities.

I meet exceptional people during the survey. Exceptional indeed, by definition, for fewer than 5% of the employed cancer researchers are here. In most instances, no other person is nearby, even had we yelled. I interview many of them. Why are they exceptional? What insights can they provide? To avoid bias, I ask open-ended, gentle questions, such as “Why are YOU here? Nobody else is here!” I suggest potential explanations already gathered from other interviewees. To a limited extent, I interview weekday workers between the hours of 9 and 5 as to their insights about early morning, evening and weekend research. The latter were, by the present definition, less exceptional.

The buildings' employees during survey hours are either absent or present. Largely absent are the faculty and hourly (generally, 37.5 contractual hrs) workers. The principal investigators, a faculty subset, by their personal reports are capable of performing their duties (writing, data analysis, NIH grant review and professional meeting attendance) off-site; indeed, they often moved off-site as work deadlines approached. The hourly workers do not work off-site, but are largely forbidden by contract or institutional policies from working during survey hours. The individuals present in the laboratories are largely trainees, comprising graduate students, postdoctoral research fellows and clinical fellows. Over 90% of salaried researchers, however, are absent at all times surveyed. I observe that during weekdays, a plurality of personnel arrives near 9:30 a.m., after the secretarial staff arrives, and leaves around 5:00 p.m. Even adjusting for off-site time devoted to scientific reading, the hourly staff works more hours on-site than many of the salaried research workforce. For the latter, this represents a professional work week of less than 40 hours.

Upon reflection, this is the 25^th anniversary of my survey. In 1985–1986, Ricardo Lloyd strongly influenced surgical pathology by cloning the anti-chromogranin antibody and applying it to reclassify wide swaths of otherwise familiar tumor types. Surprised at the disparity between this young faculty's overworked nights and weekends and the general absence of more senior faculty at these times and not yet appreciating the philosophical stance that Ric represented, I queried him on one such evening as he ran between rooms, “Why would a faculty member be working late on a Sunday night?” To which he answered, with a charitable smile and a soft-spoken “Well, you might discover something, right?” Ric's answer was a statement of visible, self-aware passion.

Today, would his answer sound naïve? It used not to be so. Perhaps medical research itself has changed. In mid-century, Harry Weaver, the director of research of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, estimated the financial requirements to enumerate the number of dominant strains causing epidemic paralytic polio, requiring that a research team work “seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for three solid years.”1 Jonas Salk's group was chosen to do this work, and they worked around the clock until eventually offering a killed virus vaccine. By 1959, A. Sabin was well-known for working seven days a week on his competing live vaccine approach to vaccinate against polio. The 1966 Nobel laureate, Charles Huggins, discovered the basis for hormonal therapy for prostate cancer, of which he said, “One works along at the lab bench without haste and without rest. Time has no meaning… These are happy days, one following another, hopefully without end, so great is the delight of discovery.”2

Today, tens of thousands of cancer researchers work barely 40 hours a week on a scourge that kills 30% of all persons, many of the victims young or of childrearing age, a puzzle involving the most severe analytic difficulties. Who is being naïve? Do we have the army we need in this war? Where is the passion?

Perhaps we are doing better than at first impression. Consider the good news I learn from these exceptional researchers encountered during my survey. A number of graduate students and fellows sheepishly suggest that they “had to come in” to manage timed experiments, such as passing cells in culture or assaying a terminating experiment. A few questions elicit that these are not in actuality reluctant weekend research warriors. The long days planned, the setting up of overnight experiments on Fridays, and the reported tendency to plan similar weekend experiments as a routine practice, all betray a private aquifer of passion.

More good news comes my way, albeit mixed. An investigator in each building answers my “Why? Nobody else is” question with the answer, “Not in the [name deleted] lab!” A full third of the attendant researchers are members of two particular laboratories. In short, they work longer on the cancer question because it is their lab's social culture to do so. The encouraging lesson? Rather than try to equalize all army units, perhaps the brunt of the battle could be brought to the right army units. Historically, when Sabin disparaged Salk as being just a “kitchen chemist”, he was openly disparaging a particular practice of the National Foundation, by which they consigned the brute-force tasks to an investigator leading the most appropriate army for the duty (i.e., not always Sabin). When the mothers of the Mothers March collected dimes, they KNEW that teams, at that minute, were performing difficult, even dangerous, research in the supported labs. Modern cancer advocates walk for a cure down the city streets on Saturday mornings across the land. They can comfortably know that, uh…let's see here…, some of their donations might receive similar passion. Anyway, the effort should be up to full force by 10 a.m. or so the following Monday.

Aspects of the good news concerning the holders of graduate professional degrees are real eyebrow-raisers. In response to my question as to why the other professionals were NOT present, I learn that “they probably finished their work for the week.” Turning aside the crass impulse to remark, “Oh, has cancer been cured already?”, it seems indeed that major endpoints in this endeavor are being accomplished on a weekly basis. In other words, across this nation, tens of thousands of benchmarks of cancer research progress are reached every few days. Despite the glowing news, I pause and wonder. Employing everfaster techniques and fail-safe commercial kits, can we soon reach the era when research ends not on Friday at 5, but Wednesday at 3, owing to having achieved our weekly breakthroughs downright breezily?

Sharing the category of eyebrow-levitating good news, the NOT-present researchers do appear to be good-to-go. In response to a re-wording of my opening question, now phrased as “Where are they?”, I learn that “they're all probably resting and relaxing.” From the evidence, modern research in a climate-controlled, safety-inspected, pathogenfree world of pre-packaged kits is simply more exhausting than the pre-air-conditioned world that fought the unclassified and yet communicable diseases of yesteryear. Today, the resting phase ensures eventual success.

These exceptional early-birds, late-nighters and weekenders are also philosophical. When asked to explain why the polio researchers worked so much longer hours, while cancer kills a much higher fraction of the population and a higher fraction of its victims, I am requested to consider, “Maybe when a goal is in the near future, it motivates you. When it is in the distant future, it doesn't so much.” Subtracting the novel temporal context, which strikes me as a valid qualifier, this suggestion reduces to, “They were motivated. We are not. But, we may have an excuse.”

Two graduate student separately introduce a blunt assessment. When I ask why one was the only person in the lab to be working weekends, while a different, similarly sized lab at that time had more weekenders, the answer is, “Maybe they care more.” Another busy student lays it out. “Many other students are punching out at 5. They see it as a 9-to-5 job.”

During the survey period, off-site laypersons offer comments on my observations. “Don't the people with families have a right to a career in cancer research also?” I choose not to answer. How would I? Do the patients have a duty to provide this “right”, perhaps by entering suspended animation? Should I note that examining other measures of passion, such as breadth of reading and fund of knowledge, may raise the same concern and that “time” is likely only a surrogate measure? Should I note that productive scientists with adorable family lives may have “earned” their positions rather than acquiring them as a “right”? Which of the other professions can adopt a country-club mentality, restricting their activities largely to a 35–40 hour week? Don't people with families have a right to be police? Lawyers? Astronauts? Entrepreneurs?

Numerically, from where arises the emptiness of the buildings? According to the National Science Foundation Survey,3 doctoral scientists in the education sector and the biological and health sciences average 52.5 hours of work per week, which agrees with the figures also for academic tenure-track faculty. The average work week for postdoctoral scholars (“postdocs”) reported was 50.3 hours. These overall numbers do not explain the observed cancer research activity levels, unless one-fifth or more of the work is being accomplished off-site.

Perhaps the faculty know. My aforementioned colleagues suggest, “Maybe it's the leadership. Maybe being at home writing grants is a bad model for trainees.” Sounds reasonable. “Employers don't ask these questions when hiring.” In my experience, true. “It's the productivity, not the hours, that matters.” Certainly, but can productive passion really be doused at 35 hours? “In my lab, off-site data analysis is not that high.” What is it, then? “Lifestyle is more important now.”

Could “doused passion” be the major bottleneck impairing medical research? Or, to mix my metaphors: Is there an elephant in this building? If so, be careful as you pass. Move along, move along.

Figures and Tables

Dr. Scott E. Kern, PhD

The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins

Acknowledgements

The Everett and Marjorie Kovler Professorship in Pancreas Cancer Research.