Academania My Life in the Trenches of Biomedical Research eBook Gail Seigel
Download As PDF : Academania My Life in the Trenches of Biomedical Research eBook Gail Seigel 
Have you ever wondered what it takes to be a scientist? In “Academania” you will be transported to the world of academic research, where ivory towers are made of stone, filled with the hopes and aspirations, jealousies and weaknesses of the very real people who work there. You will experience this unique world through the eyes of the author, Dr. Gail Seigel, a scientist who has devoted her 25-year career to medical research. Follow her real-life journey through science, ignited by the flames of a burning chemistry notebook and illuminated by a bright and unflinching resilience in the face of desperate challenges that could never darken her path. This book is written in non-technical terms for both scientists and non-scientists alike.
Academania My Life in the Trenches of Biomedical Research eBook Gail Seigel
Once in a while you pick up a book with an interesting title only to be disappointed by the content. This is not the case for Dr. Gail M. Seigel's new book, Academania: My Life in the Trenches of Biomedical Research. Seigel has written a terrific book. One of the many things I liked about it was that Seigel writes as a scientist, meaning she writes in short and direct sentences. As she says: how flowery do you have to be to describe DNA syntheses? The book is 138 pages long, all of them are full of information. If a lawyer had written this book it would have been three times as long and about one-half as good. Even better than that, she writes in a way that both scientists and non-scientists can appreciate.In the first part of her book Dr. Seigel takes us through her early life concentrating on both college and graduate studies including her postdoctoral work, a journey of ten plus years. I had no idea of the intellectual rigors associated with obtaining a Ph.D. in biomedical research nor was I aware of the time required to progress through the various programs. It is a journey that is both long and arduous and one not to be taken by the faint of heart.
As the book progresses, Dr. Seigel addresses a number of topics and issues ranging from research ethics, sabotage, copying and misappropriation of work, to the running of a lab in today's economy and much in between. Two subjects in particular caught my eye; R28 retinal cells and grants and funding.
For the non-scientist, the author explains that cells are the building blocks of life. "They allow us to take a close look at genetic and biological activities that can't be seen in a whole organism." She goes on to explain that R28 retinal cells are a continuously growing retinal cell line that was developed and established in her laboratory in the early 1990's. Over the years Seigel has seen the retinal cell lines used for a variety of interesting and worthwhile projects. Indeed, the R28 cells were commercialized in late 2012. For more on this subject, see Seigel, Mol. Vis. 20: 301-306, 2014.
Grants and funding go hand in hand and simply cannot be separated. For those who think that there is a great deal of money available to fund legitimate research projects, think again. The successful rate of applications for grants is simply appalling.
As Dr. Seigel goes into the last phase of her book she talks of her own life dealing with women in science, what a Ph.D means to her, happiness and her hopes for her own future and the future of biomedical research.
The author has given us a very readable and entertaining book that is also replete with some of the humor and adventures that she has experienced in her research travels. This is an e-book. At $3.99 (Amazon) it's a steal!
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Academania My Life in the Trenches of Biomedical Research eBook Gail Seigel Reviews
Dr. Seigel is talented researcher who is respected for her work on cells in the retina and cancer. Among her numerous contributions, she is the inventor of R28 retinal cells which have been used in laboratories around the world for studying retinal processes and diseases. If you type “R28 cells” into Google Scholar, you will find that over 10,000 articles have used or mentioned these cells. For such a distinguished scientist, this book is a remarkably readable, modest and touching description of her career – she opens her heart to the reader. I would highly recommend this book to anyone from a young person considering a career in biomedical research, to a geriatric like myself looking back over an attempted career in research. But I will argue below that this book has an important message for anyone who is concerned about eye diseases, cancer, and health care in general.
Dr. Seigel illustrates wonderfully well both the joys and frustrations of a scientific career. Her book has shown me how difficult a career in science can be nowadays. For example, the description of the stresses of the Qualifying Exam contrasts with my experience of Ph.D. studies in physics at an English university at an earlier time. The only examination I needed to take was the final oral defense of my thesis. As I remember, I had only two examiners, my Ph.D. advisor, a kindly man who treated me almost as part of his family, and an outside examiner from a different institution. It may be that they thought that my thesis was rather mediocre (they were too polite to say so), but as I had already decided to make a career in biomedical research, they may have let me pass because I would not be degrading the physics community. Perhaps the English system was too easy-going, but the experience of graduate students at her university seems unreasonably harrowing and no less subjective.
Biomedical research is perhaps the most difficult career that can be imagined. I study a relatively simple biological system – the tear film in front of the eye – but I am constantly humbled and frustrated by my inability to find good answers to simple questions. Now compare the simplicity of the tear film with the complexity of the retina with its many cell types, its hundreds of millions of cells, its billions of cell connections and the enormous complexity of the biochemical and molecular genetics interactions which occur in each cell. The task of understanding the retina deserves the full time attention of dedicated and talented researchers like Dr. Seigel. It is therefore greatly disturbing to hear about the problems of such a leading scientist in obtaining funding for her research and the excessive time she needs to spend submitting grant applications at the expense of carrying out her research.
There is a shocking imbalance between demand for biomedical research funding and supply. Limitation and cutbacks in government funding are an obvious cause of these difficulties which I will discuss below. Another part of the problem is the supply side of the equation - there is a large pool of talented young biomedical scientists. An inspirational scientist, such as Dr. Seigel, inevitably encourages her Ph.D. students to follow in a similar path. If each biomedical research scientist encourages, on average, more than one student to follow a similar research career, then the number of researchers will increase exponentially and must unavoidably outgrow the research support available. I like to think I have helped to balance the dynamics by being an uninspiring advisor – some students have tolerated me as an advisor, and they have gone on to admirable careers as optometrists, university teachers and administrators, but none took up a research career. However, my contribution to reducing the supply of new biomedical researchers has probably not been sufficient to offset the number of motivated, aspiring researchers generated by Dr. Seigel’s enthusiasm! She is to be commended for pointing out the current funding problems which young people are currently experiencing in establishing research careers. But it is sad that these problems may be dissuading talented students like herself from undertaking research aimed at understanding the human body and improving medical treatment.
The most important message of the book, which will affect everyone in the United States, is that biomedical research is in a state of crisis. If research funding is so competitive that a researcher with Dr. Seigel’s talents cannot support her work, and spends much of her time writing grants which do not get funded, then the country is wasting her talents. I just checked that the NIH budget is $30 billion and our military budget is $555 million – equal to the combined military budgets of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, UK, Germany, Japan, India and South Korea. So NIH spending is only 5 to 6% of military spending. Our military is obviously of great importance to us, but so is our health. Most young people have no health problems, but as we grow older, we develop health problems and appreciate how the medical treatment we receive benefits from research which has been done in the past. As I am no longer competing for research funds, I have no vested interest in saying that I think that support for NIH is too low as a fraction of the federal budget. If we do not fix the current problems of biomedical research , future medical treatment will not take full advantage of all the country’s talent which can help to improve it.
One of the things I (as a layman) appreciate about this book is Dr. Seigel's light and breezy writing style that's conversational and engaging. The story of her life in academia contains much advice for those who might consider such a career, but this book also provides an important peek into the inner workings of collaborative, "chicken soup" science, as she puts it the advantages, the drawbacks, the subterfuge of bad actors, and the corruption that power over others brings, but—most importantly—the rewards when it all comes together and real scientific progress is made.
It's a sad commentary on the state of affairs when the prevailing attitude in the country is that less government spending equals a better life for everyone when this is so clearly not the case, specifically when it comes to research spending. We are to the point, now, when only 10% of government grants are awarded. As Dr. Seigel writes, "I am a minimum wage worker with no benefits. Sometimes my job involves washing dishes, but I do not work in the fast food industry. I run a cutting-edge cancer research laboratory at a large university." We are truly lucky that dedicated people like Dr. Seigel continue to work on scientific research in this day and age.
Once in a while you pick up a book with an interesting title only to be disappointed by the content. This is not the case for Dr. Gail M. Seigel's new book, Academania My Life in the Trenches of Biomedical Research. Seigel has written a terrific book. One of the many things I liked about it was that Seigel writes as a scientist, meaning she writes in short and direct sentences. As she says how flowery do you have to be to describe DNA syntheses? The book is 138 pages long, all of them are full of information. If a lawyer had written this book it would have been three times as long and about one-half as good. Even better than that, she writes in a way that both scientists and non-scientists can appreciate.
In the first part of her book Dr. Seigel takes us through her early life concentrating on both college and graduate studies including her postdoctoral work, a journey of ten plus years. I had no idea of the intellectual rigors associated with obtaining a Ph.D. in biomedical research nor was I aware of the time required to progress through the various programs. It is a journey that is both long and arduous and one not to be taken by the faint of heart.
As the book progresses, Dr. Seigel addresses a number of topics and issues ranging from research ethics, sabotage, copying and misappropriation of work, to the running of a lab in today's economy and much in between. Two subjects in particular caught my eye; R28 retinal cells and grants and funding.
For the non-scientist, the author explains that cells are the building blocks of life. "They allow us to take a close look at genetic and biological activities that can't be seen in a whole organism." She goes on to explain that R28 retinal cells are a continuously growing retinal cell line that was developed and established in her laboratory in the early 1990's. Over the years Seigel has seen the retinal cell lines used for a variety of interesting and worthwhile projects. Indeed, the R28 cells were commercialized in late 2012. For more on this subject, see Seigel, Mol. Vis. 20 301-306, 2014.
Grants and funding go hand in hand and simply cannot be separated. For those who think that there is a great deal of money available to fund legitimate research projects, think again. The successful rate of applications for grants is simply appalling.
As Dr. Seigel goes into the last phase of her book she talks of her own life dealing with women in science, what a Ph.D means to her, happiness and her hopes for her own future and the future of biomedical research.
The author has given us a very readable and entertaining book that is also replete with some of the humor and adventures that she has experienced in her research travels. This is an e-book. At $3.99 () it's a steal!
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