Congrats Sarah! Vancouver is lucky to have you. Hope the transition goes smoothly.

I often wonder with these stats how much privilege comes into play. A doctorate lowers your earning potential significantly while you’re in it. This is a risk that is usually taken if the person has at (least some) financial backing. Such risks are less likely to be taken by the less privileged.

It likely will unless course is changed fast. Science adapts sociological trends just more slowly.

Sounds nice in theory, but how can the student be competitive for post docs and later, ECR awards without publications? It’s just setting students up for career failure in the current world. If you want to change science, change uni hiring practices first.

Congratulations! The preprint was already fantastic - can’t wait to read the full story.

Also such uncertainty is why you always want to show a phenotype in multiple different ways.

I think you’re touching on exactly what makes science difficult; dealing with uncertainty. If the validation is scientifically sound do you scrap the entire paper just because of omics stats? Get rid of the omics data only? If we do this we’re depriving the reader of crucial foundational info…

Stats cutoffs are anyway arbitrarily set. Just because there’s a significance with a conservative test doesn’t mean there’s a biologically relevant effect (or size) and vice versa. Stats are a tool for discovery and if they have validated their findings with functional experiments I see no issue.

But I 100% agree on the importance with playing with the data in a less hypothesis-driven way. Insightful article.

Walk before you run. This is great advice for scientists that have been devising hypothesis driven experiments for a while, but likely a bad place to start as a new trainee. Making hypotheses, and performing control driven science is a crucial fundamental skill to have.

Timeless poem.