i’m awesome too
A good friend of mine is in town this weekend so I’ll keep it short and sweet.
I recently came across a list of the 100 science articles that every graduate student should read on a scientist’s blog. I curiously looked through the list and noticed very quickly that 9 of the about 76 (so far) posted articles were written by him! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! Watson and Crick’s Nature article on the double helix structure of DNA was not even on the list. And the articles that were seemed to be mostly potentially useful to only a small subset of graduate students. I won’t mention the scientist’s name because I don’t want to draw negative attention to this dude from my blog, but, COME ON!!!! I pubmed-ed this scientist and noticed that, yes, he does good–no, great–science. But to tell me that over 10% of the 100 articles every graduate student should read was written by this dude’s hand? C’moooonnnnnnnnn… A few of you might have seen this distributed over twitter and/or my response to it, so if you’ve taken a look at the list, am I wrong?
This is what I look like on a bad hair day. Except that I'd never get caught dead in striped swim trunks.
Not that accolades mean much but even if this dude had won a Nobel prize, was a member of the National Academy of Sciences or HHMI (note though this person has accomplished none of those things), there’s been so much amazing science, which should be at foundation of every biomedical graduate student’s education, that no person could possibly take credit for such a large chunk of it. That’s just my opinion though. But hey, even I need my ego stroked sometimes–I just think it comes across better when it’s someone else doing it.
So the final conclusion that I draw is that one’s blog must be the place for self-aggrandizement. Therefore I just want to tell you that while this dude can take credit for roughly 10% of the 100 articles all graduate students should read, I can take credit for the other roughly 90%. But then again, you already knew that.
Mudphudder out.
May 9th, 2009 at 8:58 am
I don’t know if perhaps this is something that he updated on his own blog after receiving criticism, but as of now it states “a list of 100 important publications that every one of my graduate students should read” and I think the MY graduate students part is key. When I joined my own lab, my PI provided me with a large stack of papers to read to acclimate me with the type of research I would be doing, as it was vastly different than anything I had ever done before — I would guess that 50% of the papers he gave me were papers that came out of his own lab, just to catch me up on what was going on. Looking through the 100 papers list, very few things apply to me as a biochemistry student in oncology; but they are likely very relevant to his student. If he is trying to make a list for every graduate student to read, he has missed the target by being far too specific and completely missed entire disciplines of very basic sciences (and, indeed, tooting his own horn far too much); if he is creating a list for his particular students, then he may be right on, and not particularly pompous at all by feeling that his students should be reading his own papers, because they may be most relevant to the type of work done by his students.
May 9th, 2009 at 9:25 am
No arguments from me Julie. But I did NOT see a “my” when I went over all of it yesterday. Also, as twittered by @berci yesterday: “100 Publications Every Graduate Student Should Read [url here]”
Also, everything I said about myself is still true.
May 12th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Hilarious.