Confessions of a Subversive Grad. Student

Pulling an All-Nighter in the Age of HIV/AIDS

I spent the last week 'helping' my supervisor prepare a grant that would fund our laboratory for the next four years. It asked for half a million-tax payer dollars. While the process of grant writing in a contemporary HIV/AIDS laboratory reveals the characteristic money squandering in the field, it also demonstrates other scary pathways research has taken since the birth of 'HIV science’.

Through discussions with older scientists, I have discovered that the work requested of graduate students in such contemporary labs differs considerably from what was expected in the past.

Previously, students worked late to complete their experiments. Today’s biomedical PhDs "in training" are expected to work late hours to do not only their own work, but also that of their supervisors. And so I spent the past three days and nights laboring in committee with fellow students editing "some" sense into a god awful mess of a grant request that you will pay for, thinking it represents something resembling original thinking on the part of the illustrious name belonging to the principal investigator (PI).

I have learned from more senior residents in "the lab" (or "the stockade" as we call it when the prof is not around, and how we "sometimes" answer the lab phone) that this behavior is nothing special for the ‘brilliant’ PI who despite demonstrating no knowledge of the literature in our weekly lab meetings,  and who cannot construct a scientific argument involving more than two steps, and who runs his lab like a tyrant, has been funded numerous times by prestigious national and international private and government organizations.

My experience during this process clarified why the contemporary HIV/AIDS lab is in its current tragi-comic state. Change is not possible when the vast majority of the funding to conduct expensive and influential studies is given to these "lazy and ignorant academics” (a term which is no longer the oxymoron it should be).

Grad. Student studies B-cell immunology at a well known university that is not in Australia. He has previously contributed first-hand reports from the Toronto AIDS show.

Comments

[George]

SGS,

How true. An all nighter ain't what it used to be. That's for damn sure certain.

I hope you managed to sneak a few "worms and viruses" into the code of the grant request o).