Senior Manager, Scientific IP Lead at Prilenia Therapeutics | PhD Biochemist | Expert in Preclinical Drug Development | Founder & Manager, Women in Biotech Community
Skepticism is the secret weapon of a good scientist.
Do you agree?
Elizabeth Holmes’ rise and fall is often seen as ambition gone wrong, but for me, it highlights something fundamental about being a scientist.
You all know the story, right? If not, Google it!
In biotech, we often face pressure to deliver results quickly. Boards, investors, and stakeholders expect success. But the best scientists don’t compromise on truth. Every assumption must be questioned, every result checked. This isn’t about slowing innovatio- it’s about ensuring it’s real.
After my PhD, a reviewer requested that we replicate our results in another cell line. By then, I had transitioned to the industry, and another PhD student took over. When the results were repeated in different hands and cells, that was the best proof of success.
At Prilenia, where I now work in the science team I collaborate with brilliant colleagues who push themselves to innovate while validating every idea with solid, fact-based science. It’s a company rooted in integrity and rigor.
Holmes' story isn’t just about having a bold vision, it’s a reminder that data, truth, and transparency must always come first.
#LeadershipInScience#ScientificIntegrity#Innovators#TrustTheData#EthicsInBiotech
Agree and would also add that external dilligence by scientists is critical for companies developing precision tests. There were so many red flags that would have been identified earlier if scientists were looking under the hood.
I use the time of my trainings as an opportunity for people to reflect on topics they never do simply because they have no time to do it. It's a moment of contemplation, but it's also a moment of focus where people can think about only one thing at the time, which allows them to go deeper.
Training professionals should not be about throwing a list of concepts that people can easily learn on their own at their own pace, but to create activities that promote reflection and discussion (with self and/or with others), which is an effective way of learning. Prepare some material for people to study outside of the classroom and then give them space and time to really learn it, together.
Scientific Director @Clinic Buchinger Wilhelmi | Research Fellow @ King’s College London | PhD | Research how to live a long, fulfilling and sustainable life by healthy eating and fasting 🧬
‼️Scientists need more time to think ‼️
I feel this strongly. The more I have tasks and duties, progressing in my career, the less I am creative, and the less I am likely to make disruptive work.
I always felt that having a vivid imagination is a strength to cultivate as a scientist.
But I see so many colleagues who feel stuck and do not enjoy their scientific careers. The necessity for productivity that drives our society is really at odds with the nature of scientific research.
That’s one of the reasons I transitioned to the industry, while still maintaining some ties with academia, as it remains my core community. I’m fortunate to work for a company that values scientific excellence and understands that achieving greatness requires time.
Let us waste time, practice deep thinking, wanders through dumb and fanciful thoughts. We need it !
https://lnkd.in/dMkEZagj
This is a serious problem.
I found through my 50 years as a scientist that scientists are doing more and more mundane work and spend less and less time thinking.
There used to be secretaries to type manuscripts, draftspeople to make figures, technical support, etc. These days, especially in academia, perversely highly-trained (and relatively highly-paid) scientists are expected to do these tasks, leaving very little time for research. And what time there is, is eaten up with endless committee meetings and emails and reviews etc etc etc.
Has there been a commensurate drop in fundamental advances? I think so. There are more and more papers published, but the vast majority don't move the knowledge boundaries much at all.
The answer surely is that we need a fundamental reset of our Universities. They should not be seen as businesses with cost centres, but for what they are supposed to be, which is spaces for free thought to advance our knowledge and understanding. And scientists should be given far more support to alleviate time on dull work.
Scientific Director @Clinic Buchinger Wilhelmi | Research Fellow @ King’s College London | PhD | Research how to live a long, fulfilling and sustainable life by healthy eating and fasting 🧬
‼️Scientists need more time to think ‼️
I feel this strongly. The more I have tasks and duties, progressing in my career, the less I am creative, and the less I am likely to make disruptive work.
I always felt that having a vivid imagination is a strength to cultivate as a scientist.
But I see so many colleagues who feel stuck and do not enjoy their scientific careers. The necessity for productivity that drives our society is really at odds with the nature of scientific research.
That’s one of the reasons I transitioned to the industry, while still maintaining some ties with academia, as it remains my core community. I’m fortunate to work for a company that values scientific excellence and understands that achieving greatness requires time.
Let us waste time, practice deep thinking, wanders through dumb and fanciful thoughts. We need it !
https://lnkd.in/dMkEZagj
Did you know that being constantly interrupted by dings, alerts, e-mail notifications, Teams chats, etc. is the equivalent of smoking a joint? Ok, not quite, but...
Yes, there was actually a study that showed that constant interruptions essentially lowered your IQ 5 points, nearly the same as smoking a joint.
If you want to increase your creativity or even your productivity, the ability to think without interruption is crucial. And that's one of the easiest productivity hacks that there is-- all of those notifications? Turn them off.
Scientific Director @Clinic Buchinger Wilhelmi | Research Fellow @ King’s College London | PhD | Research how to live a long, fulfilling and sustainable life by healthy eating and fasting 🧬
‼️Scientists need more time to think ‼️
I feel this strongly. The more I have tasks and duties, progressing in my career, the less I am creative, and the less I am likely to make disruptive work.
I always felt that having a vivid imagination is a strength to cultivate as a scientist.
But I see so many colleagues who feel stuck and do not enjoy their scientific careers. The necessity for productivity that drives our society is really at odds with the nature of scientific research.
That’s one of the reasons I transitioned to the industry, while still maintaining some ties with academia, as it remains my core community. I’m fortunate to work for a company that values scientific excellence and understands that achieving greatness requires time.
Let us waste time, practice deep thinking, wanders through dumb and fanciful thoughts. We need it !
https://lnkd.in/dMkEZagj
I have felt for some time that as the pace of publication speeds up the pace of science has slowed. The article referenced by Tara McLaren goes someway to indicate that this might be so.
In over 40 years in research I saw the increasing tendency induced by grant funding to think in bite sized chunks. This was then compounded by grant proposals which needed to contain Gant Charts, goals, detailed programmes of work which in my view reduced the importance of vision and increased incrementalism.
Alongside the growth of speed in communication technologies as noted in the article was the reduction in support staff close to scientists and increasing the idea of self service administration and raising the burden on researchers. HR practices, workload modelling, every one with a rationale for their introduction, resulted cumulatively in reduced time for research less time for thought. The pressure on the big book in favour of salami slicing. All of these have reeked their toll.
Some of the best researchers managed to resist and to maintain their time to think others joined the endless treadmill, complaining but complying.
The number of administrators has grown to, in theory support the institution, but more often to oversee, chase, hassle, monitor but rarely to support the researcher.
The rise in student numbers and massification has likewise applied pressure.
I remember the first anecdote I was told as a junior administrator by James Walsh, Registrar at the University of Leeds in the 1980’s. When starting out in the 1950’s he was sent to see the Professor of Italian. He had on his desk a large pile of papers. “These are from the administration” said the Professor. With that he pushed them all into the dustbin. “If there is anything important they’ll be in touch.” Now with technology they are always in touch! But rarely questioning the impact on thinking time.
The best advice I ever gave researchers, in my view, was what is the biggest problem you want to solve and what are you passionate about? But this struggles to fit in a grant proposal box. Some grant proposals can have 20 pages or less of supporting case but hundreds of pages of additional material. Grant funders have been complicit in this.
Research-led Universities must place researchers truly at the heart of their institutions not HR, not PR , not Finance if science, in its broadest sense, and scientists are to flourish.
Scientific Director @Clinic Buchinger Wilhelmi | Research Fellow @ King’s College London | PhD | Research how to live a long, fulfilling and sustainable life by healthy eating and fasting 🧬
‼️Scientists need more time to think ‼️
I feel this strongly. The more I have tasks and duties, progressing in my career, the less I am creative, and the less I am likely to make disruptive work.
I always felt that having a vivid imagination is a strength to cultivate as a scientist.
But I see so many colleagues who feel stuck and do not enjoy their scientific careers. The necessity for productivity that drives our society is really at odds with the nature of scientific research.
That’s one of the reasons I transitioned to the industry, while still maintaining some ties with academia, as it remains my core community. I’m fortunate to work for a company that values scientific excellence and understands that achieving greatness requires time.
Let us waste time, practice deep thinking, wanders through dumb and fanciful thoughts. We need it !
https://lnkd.in/dMkEZagj
It’s great to see this being highlighted in Nature.
"A study has shown that science is becoming less disruptive, even though there are now more papers being published and grants awarded than ever before” - (Nature, 2024).
Time management makes sense in a manufacturing plant, but not in academia. In a manufacturing plant, productivity is achieved by improving the efficiency of processes, producing more in less time with fewer errors. In the academic world, however, we are not producing standardised products. We model students’ minds (a craft in itself), generating groundbreaking ideas, theories, and significant, contextually relevant research projects.
Managing time in academia is not enough; ATTENTION should be prioritised.
“A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.” (Han, The Burnout Society).
Scientific Director @Clinic Buchinger Wilhelmi | Research Fellow @ King’s College London | PhD | Research how to live a long, fulfilling and sustainable life by healthy eating and fasting 🧬
‼️Scientists need more time to think ‼️
I feel this strongly. The more I have tasks and duties, progressing in my career, the less I am creative, and the less I am likely to make disruptive work.
I always felt that having a vivid imagination is a strength to cultivate as a scientist.
But I see so many colleagues who feel stuck and do not enjoy their scientific careers. The necessity for productivity that drives our society is really at odds with the nature of scientific research.
That’s one of the reasons I transitioned to the industry, while still maintaining some ties with academia, as it remains my core community. I’m fortunate to work for a company that values scientific excellence and understands that achieving greatness requires time.
Let us waste time, practice deep thinking, wanders through dumb and fanciful thoughts. We need it !
https://lnkd.in/dMkEZagj
We should consider that there is a conflicting duties between an academics and a scientists. Scientists in universities (and in fact, scholars of all disciplines) are more like labour working for the university management to pursuit various universities’ goals for the sake of the universities rather than pursuing the science itself. Universities nowadays are too managerial.
Scientific Director @Clinic Buchinger Wilhelmi | Research Fellow @ King’s College London | PhD | Research how to live a long, fulfilling and sustainable life by healthy eating and fasting 🧬
‼️Scientists need more time to think ‼️
I feel this strongly. The more I have tasks and duties, progressing in my career, the less I am creative, and the less I am likely to make disruptive work.
I always felt that having a vivid imagination is a strength to cultivate as a scientist.
But I see so many colleagues who feel stuck and do not enjoy their scientific careers. The necessity for productivity that drives our society is really at odds with the nature of scientific research.
That’s one of the reasons I transitioned to the industry, while still maintaining some ties with academia, as it remains my core community. I’m fortunate to work for a company that values scientific excellence and understands that achieving greatness requires time.
Let us waste time, practice deep thinking, wanders through dumb and fanciful thoughts. We need it !
https://lnkd.in/dMkEZagj
Scientific Director @Clinic Buchinger Wilhelmi | Research Fellow @ King’s College London | PhD | Research how to live a long, fulfilling and sustainable life by healthy eating and fasting 🧬
‼️Scientists need more time to think ‼️
I feel this strongly. The more I have tasks and duties, progressing in my career, the less I am creative, and the less I am likely to make disruptive work.
I always felt that having a vivid imagination is a strength to cultivate as a scientist.
But I see so many colleagues who feel stuck and do not enjoy their scientific careers. The necessity for productivity that drives our society is really at odds with the nature of scientific research.
That’s one of the reasons I transitioned to the industry, while still maintaining some ties with academia, as it remains my core community. I’m fortunate to work for a company that values scientific excellence and understands that achieving greatness requires time.
Let us waste time, practice deep thinking, wanders through dumb and fanciful thoughts. We need it !
https://lnkd.in/dMkEZagj
Scientific Director @Clinic Buchinger Wilhelmi | Research Fellow @ King’s College London | PhD | Research how to live a long, fulfilling and sustainable life by healthy eating and fasting 🧬
‼️Scientists need more time to think ‼️
I feel this strongly. The more I have tasks and duties, progressing in my career, the less I am creative, and the less I am likely to make disruptive work.
I always felt that having a vivid imagination is a strength to cultivate as a scientist.
But I see so many colleagues who feel stuck and do not enjoy their scientific careers. The necessity for productivity that drives our society is really at odds with the nature of scientific research.
That’s one of the reasons I transitioned to the industry, while still maintaining some ties with academia, as it remains my core community. I’m fortunate to work for a company that values scientific excellence and understands that achieving greatness requires time.
Let us waste time, practice deep thinking, wanders through dumb and fanciful thoughts. We need it !
https://lnkd.in/dMkEZagj
As long as they can deliver a PCC in 13 months on average - they can think as long as they like. When it comes to drug discovery I believe in the "Blink Moments" - if your target hypothesis can not be formed in one day, you will not be able to do a better job in a year. What we need is rapid validation.
Scientific Director @Clinic Buchinger Wilhelmi | Research Fellow @ King’s College London | PhD | Research how to live a long, fulfilling and sustainable life by healthy eating and fasting 🧬
‼️Scientists need more time to think ‼️
I feel this strongly. The more I have tasks and duties, progressing in my career, the less I am creative, and the less I am likely to make disruptive work.
I always felt that having a vivid imagination is a strength to cultivate as a scientist.
But I see so many colleagues who feel stuck and do not enjoy their scientific careers. The necessity for productivity that drives our society is really at odds with the nature of scientific research.
That’s one of the reasons I transitioned to the industry, while still maintaining some ties with academia, as it remains my core community. I’m fortunate to work for a company that values scientific excellence and understands that achieving greatness requires time.
Let us waste time, practice deep thinking, wanders through dumb and fanciful thoughts. We need it !
https://lnkd.in/dMkEZagj
Passionate Computer Vision and Machine Learning Researcher | Transforming Ideas into Impact | Associate Professor in Computer and Biomedical Engineering 🚀
Scientists need more time to think, less bureaucracy to deal with, and better environments to be part of.
That’s why many #academics move to #industry . Companies need to be competitive, and they have realized that their members (I on purpose avoided the word workers/employees) need to be listened and understood, to make them happier and empowered, hence, more productive.
#academia#research#productivity#softskills
Scientific Director @Clinic Buchinger Wilhelmi | Research Fellow @ King’s College London | PhD | Research how to live a long, fulfilling and sustainable life by healthy eating and fasting 🧬
‼️Scientists need more time to think ‼️
I feel this strongly. The more I have tasks and duties, progressing in my career, the less I am creative, and the less I am likely to make disruptive work.
I always felt that having a vivid imagination is a strength to cultivate as a scientist.
But I see so many colleagues who feel stuck and do not enjoy their scientific careers. The necessity for productivity that drives our society is really at odds with the nature of scientific research.
That’s one of the reasons I transitioned to the industry, while still maintaining some ties with academia, as it remains my core community. I’m fortunate to work for a company that values scientific excellence and understands that achieving greatness requires time.
Let us waste time, practice deep thinking, wanders through dumb and fanciful thoughts. We need it !
https://lnkd.in/dMkEZagj
CEO @ Boudicca Dx | Precision Medicine Consulting | Regulatory Professional | Clinical Biomarker Development | Companion Diagnostics | IVD Product Development | Clinical Molecular Technologist (LDTs) | Scientific Advisor
1moAgree and would also add that external dilligence by scientists is critical for companies developing precision tests. There were so many red flags that would have been identified earlier if scientists were looking under the hood.